Category Archives: Public Housing

Anti-Racism, China, Public Housing, Social Democracy

COVID-19 is Causing Far More Suffering in Australia Than It Should

July 9, 2020

Photo Above: Police roughly arrest a mother for attempting to visit her children who are residing in one of Melbourne’s locked down public housing towers.

A Deadly Tale of Nationalist Arrogance, Capitalist Greed,
Cold War Fear Mongering and Dog Whistling to Racism

COVID-19 is Causing Far More
Suffering in Australia Than It Should

“First World” Arrogance and Callous Indifference for the Poor, Ill and Elderly
“Herd Immunity” Means Culling of the Herd
The Victorian ALP Government’s Cruelly Implemented Lockdown of Public Housing Tenants
U.S., Britain, Australia and the Inherent Deficiencies of the Capitalist System
The Politically Motivated Selection of Travel Restrictions Caused the Death of Scores of Australians
All the Ugliness Comes Out
For United Working Class Struggle!

9 July 2020: In just the last week, Australia has had well over a thousand people newly infected with COVID-19. The coronavirus is spreading quickly in Melbourne’s working class suburbs. Migrant workers, in particular, often work in crucial frontline roles – as supermarket workers, cleaners, transport workers, health sector employees etc – where it is harder to protect oneself from catching infectious diseases. Rather than responding to the virus spread in migrant working class areas with compassion and support, the Australian ruling class, from its politicians to its media to its police enforcers, have responded with stigmatisation and cruelty.

Worldwide, the current pandemic has killed over half a million people. Such infectious diseases have caused immense suffering to humans since time immemorial. The H1N1 influenza A pandemic that started in the latter months of World War 1 killed between 21 million and 100 million people! That outbreak “originated” in the U.S. and was then carried by infected troops to Europe [1]. The virus was colloquially known as the “Spanish Flu” but this was only because Spain, a neutral country during the war, did not censor reports on the epidemic.

The emergence of a disease that causes widespread death is a natural disaster that could “originate” anywhere. Naturally, on sheer probability, a disease is more likely to start in one of the countries with the largest populations. However, speaking about “where a disease started” is a misnomer. For new viruses and bacteria are merely mutations of previously existing ones. These organisms are constantly evolving. Some animal-hosted viruses may jump from animal to human in a form already quite adapted to a human host, while others may mutate within humans for long periods before becoming infectious. Therefore, speaking about “where a virus started” depends on how far you want to go back in time.

The outbreak of an infectious disease is impossible to stop at its source. Before the first people infected become ill enough to seek treatment they would have likely passed the disease onto others. Moreover, before there is enough cases for doctors to notice the new threat, the disease would have spread still further. This is especially the case for COVID-19, which while being truly deadly for many only produces mild symptoms in most. Once there is a spread of a new disease, the amount of suffering that it causes, as with any natural disaster, depends much on the efforts of humans and our social systems. As a result, the level of suffering caused by the new virus has varied greatly from country to country.

All the above indicates just how unscientific was the right-wing Australian government’s proposal for an international “inquiry” focused solely on the “origin” of COVID-19. Those issues are of scientific interest. However, the far more important issue is that part of the pandemic that can actually be controlled: that is once there was an initial spread how effective were the measures taken to contain it. Fortunately, the focus of the government’s proposal was in fair part rejected by most countries [2]. Instead, the World Health Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution to investigate the overall response to the pandemic rather than on only its origins. The Australian government’s rebuffed emphasis, which had been fully backed by the ALP “opposition,” was not simply a scientific error. It was politically motivated. Their aim was to help themselves and their U.S. allies to score propaganda points against China, the world’s largest socialistic country, where they claim that the virus “originated” from (although recent evidence may suggest otherwise). They had another aim too. By getting everyone obsessed with the “origins” of the virus, Australia’s rulers wanted to divert people from the fact that their own response to the pandemic has been deeply flawed and that of their key allies, the U.S. and Britain, downright catastrophic [3] [4].

Australian authorities endlessly boast about their “successful” response to the coronavirus threat. However, their boast is true only in comparison with the likes of the U.S., Brazil, Britain, Russia, Sweden and India which have had really failed responses. Australia’s death toll per resident from the pandemic is now 30% higher than China’s despite Australia having had the huge advantage of having time to prepare for the arrival of the virus [5] [6]. Furthermore, while China has thus far avoided a large second wave, Australia’s second biggest city is experiencing just such a virus resurgence. Moreover, in comparison with some countries with more difficult circumstances, including many of those that share borders with China and, thus, were more vulnerable to a virus spread from Wuhan, the suffering caused by COVID-19 is far worse in Australia. It is important to note that five of the countries that share borders with China have thus far had no deaths from COVID-19 whatsoever!

Three of these countries sharing borders with China and currently having no COVID-19 deaths are socialistic countries like China itself. Those countries are Vietnam, North Korea and Laos [7] [8] [9]. The socialist system, in which the key means of production are under collective ownership, enables resources to be pooled to respond to natural disasters. Nevertheless, two of the countries bordering China that currently have had no coronavirus deaths – Mongolia and Bhutan [10] [11] – are not socialistic. This shows that, although a country burdened by capitalist rule would not be able to replicate the response that socialistic China made had they been faced with similar circumstances of a previously unknown disease spreading quickly, even a capitalist country could, with correct policies, make an effective response provided they had forewarning that the virus was on its way, as Australia certainly did. Other lower income countries have also responded more successfully to the virus than Australian authorities have. Rwanda has had just three COVID-19 deaths so far compared to the 106 in Australia [12].

That COVID-19 has not, at this time, devastated Australia to the extent that it has the U.S and Britain is more due to this country’s geography rather than good management. Firstly, Australia is an island and islands are a lot easier to implement quarantine measures in. Thus, many island nations have fared comparatively well during this pandemic. Many of Australia’s island neighbours have not had a single death from the coronavirus including Fiji and New Caledonia [13] [14]. The second factor that should have made it relatively easy to deal with a virus threat here is the fact that Australia has one of the world’s lowest population densities. This matters, because when people are living more tightly together diseases naturally spread more quickly. Thus, Thailand faced difficult circumstances because not only was she the second country to report a coronavirus case, Thailand has a population density that is 39 times that of Australia. Yet Thailand has had only slightly over half the number of deaths as in Australia, despite having nearly three times Australia’s population [15].

“First World” Arrogance and Callous Indifference for the Poor, Ill and Elderly

The Australian government exaggerated their capacity to deal with the pandemic. On February 28, Morrison insisted that because his government had “acted quickly”, “there is no need for us to be moving towards not having mass gatherings of people” [16]. It took a whole 50 days after Australia had reported its first case before the government implemented any social distancing measures [17] [18]. As professor at the University of New South Wales, Bill Bowtell said of the government’s response [19]:

“Let’s cut to the chase, they were warned 12 weeks ago by WHO and others what was coming. They did not accumulate test kits. They did not accumulate the necessary emergency equipment. They did not undertake a public education campaign. They gave no money to science, no money to research, no money to the International Vaccine Institute, no money to WHO. They diligently did not do anything useful.”

So what drove the leaders of Australia and other “like-minded countries” to be so tardy in responding to COVID-19? Arrogant over-confidence is part of the story. On March 11, still four days before any social distancing measures were implemented, health minister Greg Hunt boasted for the umpteenth time [20] [21] [22] that “we are as well prepared as any country in the world” [23]. In the following two months alone, a further 94 people would tragically lose their lives to the disease in Australia.

The leaders of the imperialist countries were clouded by a condescending attitude to the former colonies and semi-colonies that they saw initially affected by the virus. They saw their own systems as superior. So they thought that they did not need to quickly implement social distancing and urgently build up stocks. Moreover, they swallowed their own propaganda about China. They thought: surely we will be able to respond more effectively than a socialistic country. History sure did prove them wrong!

However, there was also something even more sinister than imperial arrogance that held back the American, Australian and other Western leaders from responding quickly enough to the pandemic. On February 25, Trump made a tweet whose last sentence gave the game away [24]:

“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA…. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

Trump and his ilk downplayed the virus threat and therefore delayed the implementation of social distancing because they did not want measures that would disrupt business activity and harm the stock market. In short, the U.S. rulers put the profits of capitalists way ahead of the well-being of the masses. This became even more pronounced once it became clear who the virus was especially killing: black and brown people as well as frontline workers who were often from black and migrant communities themselves [25]. Egged on by extreme white supremacists, right-wing politicians demanded the end of lockdowns despite the virus continuing to spread like wildfire. This is what Republican and Democrat state governors have done. As a result, the virus is now spreading even more disastrously in the U.S.

“Herd Immunity” Means Culling of the Herd

In Britain, the unashamed indifference to the loss of lives caused by COVID-19, which in the U.S. was expressed by far-right lunatics, entirely shaped the policy of authorities there in the early phase of the pandemic. In mid-March, the British regime revealed that its “strategy” was to get 60% of the population infected “to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune…” [26] [27]! This would have resulted in between 400,000 and 1.4 million residents of Britain dying to achieve “herd immunity” so that its economy would not be hurt by second waves of infection! In practice such a pursuit of “herd immunity” actually means a culling of the herd. A culling of those too elderly or ill to any longer pull the cart of the capitalist big wigs. A culling of those working in low-skilled frontline jobs more vulnerable to being infected but whom the exploiting class considers more easily replaceable by other “beasts of burden”. A culling of the poor population living in over-crowded housing where diseases transmit easily and who are thought of as “surplus” herd by a good number of the ruling class.

It was not until late March that the conservative British government led by Boris Johnson changed their strategy and began implementing social distancing. It seems that the ruling class realised that although it was low-paid workers, Britain’s black population and working-class Asian communities that were being hit hardest, even some members of the ruling class were also being affected. Yet by the time that the British regime instituted restrictions on gatherings, over 11,000 people in England alone had already been infected [28]. It was way too late. The disease had already spread rampantly and could no longer be contained easily. That is why, other than for a couple of tiny countries, Britain has the second highest number of deaths per person in the world from the coronavirus [29].

It has been not only countries with conservative governments that implemented callous “herd immunity” strategies. So did the social democrat-run, capitalist state in Sweden. The result was disastrous [30]! The Australian government also seriously flirted with a “herd immunity” policy three months ago. In mid-March, Morrison mentioned “herd immunity” was a reason for keeping schools open [31]. Later, the government pulled back after condemnation from health experts. It seems that the Liberal government’s widely denounced response to last summer’s bushfires has made them concerned to appear like they are showing more support for those who could be impacted by the pandemic. Moreover, with the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) already having taken an approach that put their population health’s ahead of business profits, the Australian regime, obsessed as it is with scoring propaganda points against its socialistic adversary, felt constrained to put a greater weight on curbing the virus than they otherwise would have in order to not to appear callous in comparison. Yet, in capitalist societies the masses face a double-edged sword during a pandemic. On the one hand, governments could delay introducing preventative measures leading to enormous loss of life. Yet if governments do implement social distancing, given that bosses in capitalist states have the unrestricted right to lay off workers, huge numbers of workers lose their jobs or have their number of shifts slashed.

After Australian authorities belatedly implemented some of the necessary measures to curb the pandemic and maintained them for a period, as lockdowns ate into business profits, capitalists, big and small, clamoured for a rapid re-opening. As a result the federal government and state Liberal and ALP governments alike, who ultimately all serve the capitalist class, engaged in a risky rollback of measures even while significant levels of infections remain in the community. In the two weeks prior to most of Australia beginning major re-opening on June 1, this country with a population of 25 million had 144 new cases [32] [33]. By contrast, in the two weeks prior to China’s significant re-opening of the worst affected city of Wuhan on April 8, that country had 580 new cases [5] in a country with a population 57 times larger than Australia’s. That means that Australian governments attempted a rollback of social distancing when the virus was spreading 14 times more intensely than it was in China when she implemented similar re-openings. This recklessly quick re-opening is the primary cause of Melbourne’s second wave of infections.

The Victorian ALP Government’s Cruelly Implemented
Lockdown of Public Housing Tenants

Among those hardest hit by the virus second wave are public housing tenants living in tower blocks. This is due to the negligence of the Daniel Andrews-led, Victorian Labor government. Victorian authorities failed to ensure adequate disinfection of common areas in these towers. Even regular cleaning of such common areas is minimal as governments across Australia cut down spending on public housing maintenance in order to help fund tax cuts for the rich and ever increasing budgets for police, ASIO and the military. Since COVID-19 struck, large public housing blocks have only been provided with one hand sanitiser dispenser per tower, if at all, and these are often left empty [34]. What has also made tenants especially vulnerable to virus transmission is that they have often been made to stay in over-crowded units because successive Labor and Liberal governments across the country have sold off so much public housing that those able to access it have had to accept being squeezed into tiny apartments.

After residents in public housing blocks were inevitably hit with the consequences of such negligence, the Andrews government responded by banning thousands of residents in public housing towers in Flemington and North Melbourne from leaving their units. The harsh manner in which authorities have implemented the hard lockdown indicates that this measure is not mainly about trying to genuinely protect the low income public housing tenants, many of whom are from African, Middle Eastern, Asian and Islander backgrounds. Public health workers were not sent in to explain the decision or to inform tenants of what needed to be done to protect their lives. Instead, residents first knew that they were being locked in when large hordes of police appeared at their buildings and started stopping residents from leaving. Given that many of the tenants have previously suffered racist harassment from Australian cops – and some earlier from refugee detention centre guards – the presence of massive numbers of police keeping them locked up has been very frightening for many of the locked down tenants. These police have been rude and harsh. Over the first two days of the lockdown, they even prevented volunteers and friends from leaving food, medicine and other supplies for hungry tenants to pick up [35]. Most despicably, police brutally arrested a member of a charity trying to leave food for residents. It was only after loud protests from social workers that police released their hold on the arrested charity worker as the terrified dark skinned man cried out desperately, “I can’t breathe.” Police have also arrested frustrated tenants trying to hold impromptu protests against the cruelty of lockdown conditions.

Tenants have been left hungry and scared after the supplies of food and other essentials promised by the government did not even start to be provided until some 36 to 48 hours after the start of the lockdown. When supplies finally arrived they were often grossly inadequate to feed families in the apartments. The food deliveries typically consisted of tins of out of date food. Fresh food and vegetables were not provided. The only decent meals that some locked down residents were finally able to receive came through the generous efforts of volunteer social organisations and trade unions.

In the midst of a pandemic we support restrictions genuinely made to protect people from being infected. However, aside from the incredible cruelty at the way that this lockdown has been implemented and the stigmatisation involved with only applying a hard lockdown to low-income tenants who are overwhelmingly people of colour, its actual value in terms of protecting residents is questionable. With the coronavirus likely to spread through aerosol droplets and with low-income tenants unable to afford the heating expenses that would arise from keeping their windows open to let infected air disperse, having COVID positive and negative cases alike locked into cramped tiny apartments in a packed tower block is a recipe for virus spread both within households and through airflow under and around doors from room to room. If authorities were actually serious about protecting Melbourne public housing residents they would ensure that infected people could be moved into safer quarantine at hospitals or hotels. It seems that this lockdown is not about protecting the interests of tenants but has more than a whiff of being a measured aimed at sacrificing the well-being of low-income, overwhelmingly non-white skinned residents in order to stop the virus spreading to wealthier neighbourhoods.

The contrast between this Melbourne hard lockdown of public housing and the earlier lockdown in China’s hard-hit Wuhan could not be more different. Firstly, that lockdown in Wuhan did not single out low-income people but applied equally to everyone regardless of how wealthy they were. Moreover, the success of that lock down was achieved because, after Chinese health experts realised how easily the virus spreads among family members and among residents in the same apartment blocks, PRC authorities moved all COVID positive people into hospitals both to give them proper care and to ensure that they did not unwittingly transmit the virus onto others. Thirdly, rather than being implemented through police repression, the Wuhan lockdown was based on grass-roots mobilisation. Teams consisting of volunteers, neighbourhood collective representatives and community workers went door to door to explain pandemic measures and ascertain residents’ needs. As a result the overwhelming majority of people complied with measures. In the tiny percentage of cases where a person tried to violate lockdowns it was primarily these grassroots forces rather than police who would enforce measures. Therefore, those who tried to violate Wuhan’s lockdown were, for the most part, not arrested but usually escorted – and in a very small number of cases literally dragged – back to their homes by grassroots activists who were often their very own neighbours. Harsh police repression in China was really only meted out – and rightly so – to business owners trying to profiteer from the crisis by jacking up prices. Fourthly, the PRC government and local Communist Party branches ensured that Wuhan residents were actually given the supplies promised including fresh fruit and vegetables. Social media photos show many people there eating famously tasty Chinese meals during their lockdown.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the hard lockdown of certain public housing towers in Melbourne and the earlier lockdown in Wuhan is in the differing attitudes of the ruling establishments in the two countries to the locked down residents. Here, locked down tenants have been subjected to despicable racist and anti-working class insults by white supremacist politicians like Pauline Hanson and by right-wing mainstream media outlets. In contrast, China’s state media heaped praise on the residents of Wuhan for enduring a lockdown that would reduce the spread of the virus to other parts of China and would buy time for the rest of the world to respond to the virus threat. Iconic Chinese landmarks in major cities were lit up with signs expressing solidarity with the people of Wuhan [36]. China’s president repeatedly praised Wuhan’s people as “heroic” [37]. We suggest that people don’t hold their breadth waiting for Scott Morrison to praise the locked down public housing residents of Melbourne as “heroic” or for the Sydney Opera House to light up with a solidarity message for these tenants!

U.S., Britain, Australia and the Inherent Deficiencies of the Capitalist System

Even if governments in the U.S.A, Australia and other Western countries hypothetically set aside their disdain for the interests of working class people and their racial bias and truly sought to implement all the policies necessary to suppress the coronavirus threat, the amount that they could actually achieve is hampered by the structure of their societies. In capitalist societies the key means of production are owned by wealthy individual capitalists with total “freedom” to determine production. In the manufacturing sector, these capitalist bosses largely calculated that it was not profitable enough for them to quickly switch over their production to make vitally needed pandemic relief goods. The few that did mostly did so too slowly. As a result, in the crucial early period of the pandemic here, health workers were bitterly complaining about the shortage of masks and other PPE (personal protective equipment). Ironically, given the Morrison regime’s attacks on China over the pandemic, the medical mask shortage was only relieved after the Australian government procured a big quantity of masks from China in mid-April [38]. However, there remains an inadequate amount of protective suits here. Therefore, Australian health workers and others working in areas of high risk of contracting, or passing on, COVID-19 have often not been able to wear the highly effective head-to-toe, spacesuit-style protective gear that nurses, doctors and sanitation workers in socialistic China were equipped with. This is a major cause of the deadly virus spread centered around Tasmania’s North West Regional Hospital three months ago and the later outbreak at Anglicare Sydney’s nursing home in Penrith. It is also the key reason for the clusters of cases that originated when the virus jumped from returned travelers quarantined at Melbourne’s Stamford Plaza onto contractors working at the hotel.

Similarly, in the crucial earlier period of the pandemic, there were not enough testing kits available. Even people with symptoms could not get tested unless they had recently returned from overseas or if they had contact with a known case. As a result the virus spread here in that period partly undetected.

The Politically Motivated Selection of Travel Restrictions
Caused the Death of Scores of Australians

On February 1, Canberra banned non-citizens and non-permanent residents from any part of China from entering Australia. This is despite China having already quarantined off Wuhan and other hard hit cities in Hubei Province, meaning that people from the part of China where the virus was concentrated could not enter Australia anyway. At the end of February, the Australian government continued to maintain this travel ban specifically only on all of China. Yet by then, the coronavirus was spreading much more quickly in South Korea [39] and Italy [40] than in China outside of quarantined-off Hubei. One did not even need to look at China’s data to know this. At the end of February, Australia’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Paul Kelly, informed that of the 40,000 people re-entering Australia from China in February not one single person had tested positive for COVID-19 [41].

Now we do not seek the “evening out” of xenophobic measures by having travel bans introduced more uniformly! We are opposed to outright bans on foreign nationals from any country. We note that, despite the virus being far better contained in China today than in almost every other large country, China itself has not imposed an outright ban on arrivals from any country. However, in cases of a pandemic where there is a significantly higher prevalence of a disease in an overseas country then it is reasonable for measures to be taken to screen arrivals from that country and place them into quarantine for a period.

It was not until March 1 that the Australian government introduced restrictions on arrivals from another country other than China. But that country was again a state whom the Australian government saw as an adversary (although in this case not a socialistic country)! That country was Iran, the country whom the Australian government sought to intimidate in January by joining a threatening U.S. naval operation in waters
nearby to Iran. The Australian state’s selective adoption of Iran as the second country from whom arrivals would face special restrictions seemed to be motivated, at least in part, by an effort to create fear of Iran. After all, while Iran had 733 cases in the three days prior to the ban [42], South Korea and Italy which both have smaller populations had, respectively, 1,970 cases [39] and 1,047 cases [40] in that same period.

Finally on March 5, the Australian government imposed a travel ban on a country that was not an adversary: that is, South Korea. However, while capitalist South Korea is certainly an ally of Australian imperialism, nevertheless as a rule Koreans are still not white. So for a regime cynically selecting the countries that it imposes travel bans on out of political considerations, they no doubt saw listing South Korea as at least subtly contributing to a fear of Asians. The Morrison government sees such underhanded fear-mongering as “useful” in order to divert people’s frustrations at the lack of secure jobs, the shortage of affordable rental accommodation and other hardships caused by their system onto a soft target.

Meanwhile, by the time that the travel ban on South Korea was imposed, the virus was spreading more than a hundred times faster per person in Italy than in China [5] [40]. Yet the Australian government was delaying introducing any quarantine requirements on arrivals from Italy while maintaining a travel ban on arrivals from China. On March 9, Australia’s chief medical officer, Brendan Murphy, struggled to answer reporters’ questions on why the ban was imposed on China but not Italy [43]. Murphy stated that, “… we know we can’t really just put bans in place for an increasing number of countries.” But why choose to have the ban on China and not other countries when the virus was actually spreading massively faster in those other countries – arrivals from which Australia did not even then require to self-quarantine? Perhaps Murphy struggled with the question because it was the Morrison government that pressured the health bureaucrats to “advise” such a politically-motivated choice of countries to impose travel bans on. On the other hand, it could simply be that these highly paid bureaucrats see the world through the same lens as the rich people’s government they serve under.

It was only on March 11 as the death rate in Italy soared even more alarmingly that the government imposed the same measures on arrivals from Italy that were imposed on those from China. In the meantime, the coronavirus was also now spreading much faster in other European countries and in the U.S. than it was in China. In the three days up to March 15, for example, Germany, which has a population 17 times smaller than China’s, had 3068 new cases [44] as opposed to just 47 in all of China. Meanwhile, in Spain the number of new cases in the previous three days was 3,200 times higher per person than in China [45] [5]. Yet it was not until March 20 that the Morrison government placed the same restrictions on entrants from other countries that it had imposed on arrivals from China seven weeks previously.

The delay by the government in introducing any quarantining of people entering from the virus-ravaged United States and Europe, even while maintaining a China travel ban, led to some spectacular instances of “First World” arrivals spreading the virus here. Many cases can be traced back to a high-society party in the U.S. luxury resort of Aspen hosted by Australian tycoon and Liberal Party powerbroker, Andrew Abercrombie [46]. Around a dozen of the rich attendees, many of whom were Victorians, contracted the virus there. The infected Australians then returned in March and spread the virus to dozens upon dozens of others. One couple, confirmed as being infected at the high-society event, defied directions and visited shops in Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, likely causing the sudden outbreak of 35 cases in the area. Another person from the U.S. resort cluster infected many others after attending a 21st birthday party in a wealthy Melbourne suburb [47]. However, she was merely following the health advice at the time, which did not require arrivals from the U.S. to even self-isolate. Earlier, in events un-connected to the Aspen party, a doctor returning to Melbourne from the U.S. with a runny nose then treated 70 patients before being diagnosed with COVID-19 a week after his arrival [48]. However, it is not the doctor who was only at fault here. Well into March, the Australian government was still asking only people who arrived from certain “high-risk countries” (which they then deemed to be only China, Iran and South Korea) to get tested should they have symptoms.

Prior to the implementation of quarantining of arrivals from all countries, Australian passengers from cruise ships, which had already proven to be petri dishes of disease growth, were also often not tested upon arrival. On March 19, Australian authorities failed to screen 2,700 passengers, many of whom were ill, who disembarked from the Ruby Princess cruise ship. The hapless passengers then infected others when they travelled home on trains, buses and flights. At least twenty-two passengers ended up dying from COVID-19. People infected aboard the ship also unwittingly passed the virus onto staff at Tasmania’s North West Hospital, starting a massive outbreak in the region.

The fact is that a large proportion of cases came into Australia from America, Europe or cruise ships. Just how large? Up to April 30, the last day that Australian authorities published the chart “confirmed cases who acquired COVID-19 overseas by region” [49], a whopping 85% of all overseas acquired cases entered from the Americas, Europe or cruise ships! Given that Australian Department of Health data showed that up to April 30 there were in total 4,295 overseas acquired cases [50], this meant that 3,651 coronavirus-infected people entered Australia from Europe, America or cruise ships up to April 30. By contrast, the department’s infographic [49] showed that just 36 cases (a tiny 0.83% of all overseas acquired cases) entered from the entire North-East Asian region that includes China as well as South Korea and Japan! It is worth noting too that since arrivals from China had been carefully screened from the very start of the pandemic and that those still able to enter after the travel ban were forced to quarantine, arrivals from China did not cause any of the virus spread within Australia at all. The opposite was true, however, for arrivals from Europe and America. This is especially the case for the nearly two thousand infected people who arrived from these regions prior to the implementation of concentrated quarantining on March 29. Not only were they not required to even undergo home quarantining until mid-March (unlike arrivals from China, Iran and later South Korea), authorities did not even tell them to get tested until well into March even if they had symptoms! As a result many did not even know that they were infected until much later and, thus, passed the virus onto others. Other than for the likes of the upper class snobs returning from the high society Aspen party who refused directions to self-quarantine, this was of course not their fault at all. These people, just like the Ruby Princess passengers, were themselves victims of government policy. Not knowing that they were at high risk meant that they did not seek out early treatment meaning that their symptoms often became worse than they should have. Nevertheless, it was these thousands of COVID-19 cases arriving from Europe and America, along with infections caused by the Ruby Princess that became the source of most of the community transmission within Australia in its first wave.

The Australian government’s own data showed that the overwhelming majority of overseas acquired coronavirus cases entered Australia from Europe, America or cruise ships. Just a tiny 0.8% of cases entered Australia from the entire North-East Asian region that includes China and also South Korea & Japan.

Australian authorities were well aware that COVID-19 was mostly entering from Europe and America. Why then did they not move to stop the importation of cases from these regions much sooner even as they maintained a travel ban on China well after she had almost completely suppressed the virus threat? Certainly there must have been some First World chauvinism – and a degree of underlying racial prejudice – at play. But that cannot fully explain a policy so at variance with the science. There was a factor still more sinister. For in order to achieve their goal of portraying Red China negatively, the Australian regime had to maintain their specific travel ban on only China for as long as possible. And then when they were compelled to have to bring in quarantining measures on other countries, they needed to ensure that this was implemented on as few countries as possible so that as much suspicious focus could still be maintained on China. Australia’s capitalist exploiting class are obsessed with demonising socialistic China because they want to make the Australian masses acquiesce to the Australian regime’s authoritarian moves to increase the powers of the ASIO secret police, further increase funding for spy agencies and arm their military with $270 billion of new long-range missiles.

In a major speech three weeks ago, foreign minister Marise Payne, stung by China calling out rampant racism within Australia, said that “disinformation” during the pandemic “will cost lives.” She was right! Except that disinformation is coming not from China but from the Australian regime – most notably through using the skewed application of country-specific quarantine measures – and is aimed at misleading people into thinking that the main danger of virus importation was from China. This distortion of pandemic policy to meet Cold War disinformation agendas cost the lives of dozens of Australians who would not have caught the disease from community transmission had authorities taken the scientifically mandated course of introducing earlier testing and quarantining of arrivals from the U.S., Italy, Germany, Britain etc. Let’s not forget, however, that it is not only the Morrison government that is culpable here. As Anthony Albanese has often remarked, “the Labor Party was at one with the government on this one.”

All the Ugliness Comes Out

Assisted by the daily negative stories about socialistic China spread by the tycoon and government-owned media, the false impression that the Morrison regime created that COVID-19 was introduced into Australia by arrivals from China was a shot in the arm for those already filled with white supremacist prejudice. These boosted-up racists then proceeded to unleash a horrific wave of physical attacks, abuse and threats of violence against ethnic Chinese people throughout Australia. Other people of Asian background have inevitably also been targeted.

In the face of the Chinese government warning its tourists and international students of the danger of racist attack in Australia, the Morrison government has tried to greatly downplay the threat to Asian people posed by racist violence. For those living in fear of copping such attacks this is infuriating to even be denied recognition of what they are going through. Of course, the government, the ALP opposition and top bureaucrats earlier did manage to on a rare occasion state that they were “appalled” by reports of racist assaults. However, the government and the opposition knew full well that such attacks would be the inevitable result of their earlier insistence on singling out China in the application of travel restrictions and of their later crude attempts to join hard right bigot Trump in blaming China for the pandemic. Their behaviour can be compared to that of state governments throughout this country who help throw tens of thousands of people into homelessness by selling off low-rent public housing … but then try to look good by providing some modest funding for homelessness services!

If the powers that be wanted to they could let the tyres out of the far-right drive to incite hatred against Asian people. They could simply explain to people the facts about where COVID-19 actually entered this country from. However, although Morrison did on one day casually drop the truth that a lot of cases were coming from the U.S., politicians from all the parliamentary parties refused to inform the public what a tiny proportion of overseas-acquired cases originated from China. Of course, it should not matter what country a disease is transmitted from. Viruses do not carry passports! To blame any country or people for the entry of a virus is no more valid than blaming the people of a country through which a cyclone that entered Australia had previously passed. However, in the context of there being a terrifying level of racist violence against people of Chinese appearance and the prior existence of widespread bigotry in Australia against Asian people, explaining the truth that arrivals from China did not spread the virus into the community at all is vitally needed. Instead, Australian authorities moved to actually censor their own infographic that proved this fact. From the beginning of May, the Department of Health, without explanation, suddenly stopped showing on its website the pie chart, “confirmed cases who acquired COVID-19 overseas by region.” Although largely ignored by most of the mainstream media, the department had been publishing the chart daily up to that time. Moreover, a few days after they stopped showing the chart, the department obliterated the chart from its own archives so that it could no longer be found unless someone had earlier saved the exact web address of the infographic! It is very likely that the Australian regime censored its own previously published data because it undermined their attempts to blame China for the virus spread here (see: https://www.trotskyistplatform.com/australian-data-proves-chinas-pandemic-response-success/). An inevitable by-product of that censorship is that it helped extreme racists to fill the vacuum of facts with divisive lies.

Now more than ever, people need to be told the facts that stand out from the Australian regime’s censored infographic: that just 0.7% of all overseas acquired cases in Australia arrived from Sub-Saharan Africa, just over 2% from North Africa and the Middle East and just 7.5% from all of Asia, whereas seventeen out of every twenty cases entered from Europe, America or cruise ships. These facts need to be known because racist politicians, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News and right-wing shock jobs have been disgustingly blaming Asian, African, Muslim and Middle Eastern communities for the renewed virus spread in Melbourne. The entire mainstream media have fed into this racist upsurge by selectively choosing to report on the source country of an infected returned traveller almost exclusively only when that person happens to arrive from Asia, the Middle East and Africa, which is only where a small minority of cases have arrived from. Victoria’s Labor health minister, Jenny Mikakos, was guilty of the same thing last month when she stated that many of the COVID-infected returned travellers had arrived from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh [51]. Had she ever bothered to inform us earlier that the overwhelming majority of returned travellers infected with the virus then were arriving from Europe and America?! And although the Victorian ALP premier, in deference to his party’s working class base, has framed his hard lockdown of public housing residents in heavily migrant areas as a measure aimed to protect tenants, the brutally repressive manner in which it was implemented was an obvious play to redneck elements and will surely encourage white supremacist sentiments. The reality of all of these coded and open appeals to racist prejudices is that the horrific violence and abuse that rednecks have unleashed against Chinese and other East Asian people throughout this pandemic is likely to now also be turned against people of African, Muslim, South Asian, Pacific Islander and Middle Eastern backgrounds.

Meanwhile, two weeks ago, the Australian ruling class focussed on attacking yet another scapegoat for the spike in COVID-19 infections. Health minister Hunt ridiculously claimed that the mass anti-racist protests held last month were to blame [52]. This despite his own top health official saying the very opposite [53]. It is not surprising that the Australian government would make this accusation. After all, despite Hunt’s devious claim that he thought the “subject matter” of the protests “noble”, these very necessary protests were aimed not only against killer cops but against his racist, right-wing government and against racist state governments of all stripes. The truth is that not only have just four people who attended the Black Lives Matter rallies been found to have COVID-19, none of these people actually picked up the virus at the protests. The Black Lives Matter marches were outdoor events where dispersal of droplets into open air reduces the probability of virus spread. Far more dangerous is the crowding of people into indoor shops, bars and restaurants. Yet while Liberal and ALP federal and state governments tried desperately to quell the anti-racist protests aimed against them, they have been cavalier in allowing people to again crowd into dangerous, virus-spreading indoor environments.

So as you can see, the oft-repeated assertion by governments and media that “Australians have come together at this time of crisis” is simply not true. To be sure, many working class people, especially trade unionists shaped by an understanding of the need for collective action and solidarity, have responded to the crisis by upholding pandemic suppression regulations and by volunteering their time to help neighbours in need. However, many a capitalist boss has failed to provide adequate PPE for their workers or otherwise ensure COVID-safe workplace environments. Moreover, as soon as business owners were hit with any loss in revenue, these bosses did not hesitate to lay off or cut the shifts of the very workers whose toil over the years made these capitalists their fortunes. Meanwhile, some self-employed tradies, imbued with the individualistic spirit of small business owners, have continued to do jobs when pandemic restrictions have been in place and have done so in a way that recklessly ignores social distancing directives.

The dog-eat-dog nature of the capitalist economic system has created a self-centred culture that shows its most harmful side at times like these. Many people in Australia violated coronavirus social-distancing rules. This included not only beach goers but often people of wealth and power. There were not only the super-rich people returning to Victoria infected from the U.S. Aspen high society party but also Australian defence soldiers [54] and officers and recruits of the Australian Federal Police [55] who grossly violated pandemic response measures. Of course, the media and parliamentarians never highlighted that most of those violators happened to be white-skinned. Nor should they. However, when they then only focus on the ethnicity of a person who breaches social distancing guidelines when that person happens to be a person of colour, then these influencers of public opinion are consciously acting to foment racist hostility to already victimized communities.

For United Working Class Struggle!

All the prejudice and selfishness within capitalist Australian society has certainly come to the fore during this pandemic. However, something very different has been on display too. This has been evident over the last few days in the way that our trade unions, the Australian Muslim Social Services Agency, the Sikh Volunteers Australia and other community groups have organised food and supplies for locked down public housing residents in Melbourne. Such mutual aid amongst working class people and victimised ethnic groups points to the possibility of something much more powerful: working class people and all the oppressed uniting in action to oppose the racist scapegoating, fight for the measures actually needed to curb the virus spread and struggle to ensure that working class people are not made to carry the economic burden of the pandemic.

Right now we must especially stand by our sisters and brothers locked down in Melbourne public housing towers by demanding:

Police out of the public housing neighbourhoods! Send in public health and community workers instead!
The same quality food for locked down public housing tenants as those given to the more affluent returned travellers who had been quarantined in five-star hotels.
For all locked down public housing tenants to be given the option of serving their quarantine in luxury five-star hotels with all expenses provided. Let them stay in more spacious, safer rooms! Let those forced into a hard lockdown enjoy good conditions instead of being stigmatised and forced to endure further hardship!
For all electricity and gas charges to be removed until the end of winter. Let tenants turn on their heaters in full so that they can open the windows and let infected air disperse safely.
No to discriminatory imposition of hard lockdowns on public housing tenants!

More broadly the workers movement and all our allies need to fight for:

Mandatory temperature testing of everyone attending workplaces of more than two people.
Paid pandemic sick leave for all workers (including those currently casuals) and the immediate conversion to permanency of all those currently employed as casuals.
Secure jobs for all workers. That means demanding firstly that those companies still profitable – including supermarkets, construction firms and manufacturers – be forced to increase hiring at the expense of their profits; and secondly that the owners of previously profitable companies that are experiencing reduced operations be forced to pay their workers in full out of the massive profits that they have leached from these workers over the years.

Such a program can only be won through mass struggle against the capitalist exploiters and their governments. To advance this struggle it is vital that we discredit the capitalist regime by exposing just how flawed and anti-working class has been their response to the pandemic. The fact is that especially given that this land is both an island and a country with a low population density, other than for those who caught the virus abroad and could not be saved once they entered here, there should have either been just a tiny handful of COVID-19 deaths here or none at all. That people are now dying in a virus second wave is caused by Australian governments winding back social distancing measures too quickly, in deference to their capitalist masters, by their all-round neglect of the health and housing needs of public housing tenants and by the inability of the profit-driven system to ensure sufficient PPE for frontline workers. The first wave, on the other hand, was mainly caused by the Australian regime delaying introduction of mandatory testing and quarantining of arrivals from Europe, America and cruise ships and they did this in order to ensure that, for as long as possible, the focus of travel bans would be on China. As a result of this manoeuvre to create fear of socialistic China amongst the population, the virus was allowed to be brought into the community from Europe, America and cruise ships in large doses in late February and March and spread dangerously from there on in. Australia’s capitalist rulers caused dozens of people to die who otherwise would have been alive today – including the nineteen residents who tragically died at the Anglicare nursing home in Western Sydney and the eleven people who perished from the Ruby Princess-triggered North-West Tasmanian outbreak. Those close to the people who died should be furious that their precious family members and friends perished because the Australian regime distorted health policy to meet its Cold War agenda. So should all the workers who have been retrenched or lost shifts because the pandemic has been allowed to spread into the community far more widely than it should have.

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Anti-Capitalism, China, Public Housing, Unions

No Job Cuts! No Unpaid Stand Downs!

May 3, 2020

Don’t Let Rich Business Owners Make Workers Pay for the Pandemic –
Force Them to Keep Paying Wages from the Profits
They’ve Leached From Workers Over the Years!

No Job Cuts! No Unpaid Stand Downs!

3 May 2020: Australian billionaire James Packer spent much of last year cruising around in a $200 million super yacht. He is now lazing about in his $20 million holiday mansion in a U.S. resort. Packer can afford all this. This main owner of hotel and casino operator Crown Resorts has made a fortune from leaching profits out of the hard work of Crown workers. In the last five years, Crown’s owners have extracted a total profit of $4.2 billion. Yet within hours of the March 22 announcement that clubs and casinos needed to close due to COVID-19, Packer and Co. stood down without pay thousands of workers. Around 95% of the 11,500 strong Crown workforce has been cut. This is outrageous! Consider this: assuming that the average annual wage of a Crown worker is $60,000, probably an overestimate given how badly hospitality workers are paid, then Packer and the other shareholders could pay all the stood down workers their full wages for six and a half years out of the profits that they have leached from these workers’ labour in just the last five years!

Packer is hardly alone in acting this way. Right across Australia, the owners of cafes, restaurants, gyms, airlines, tourism operations and factories are throwing onto the scrap heap the very same workers who made these capitalists their fortunes. We must not stand for this! Ultra-rich business owners should not be allowed to retrench workers or stand down workers without pay. We must force them to keep on paying us in full out of the profits that they have leached from our labour over the years.

It is Workers Who Are Bearing the Economic Pain of the COVID-19 Pandemic

For years, Australian governments – Liberal, ALP and ALP-Greens coalitions alike – have kept the dole at cruelly low levels. The right-wing media have “justified” this by insulting unemployed workers as lazy. However, with so many workers now thrown onto Centrelink queues it is hard to sell that lie. So, now the new line that the regime is selling us is that “everyone needs to share the economic pain” caused by the pandemic. Except it is workers who are being made to bear all that pain! Sure, there are also some small businesses that are not making a profit right now. But let’s not buy the line that those small business owners using hired labour are simply, innocent “battlers.” Many of these small business owners axing jobs now are the ones most notorious for illegally under-paying their staff and otherwise bullying their workers. And how many workers employed in small businesses see their supposed “battler” boss turn up each day in a flashy Mercedes or BMW!

Let’s remember that when any business using hired labour, big or small, winds up, the owners still have all their personal wealth that they have extracted from exploiting their workers as well as all the money that they will get from selling the equipment and other business assets that they had bought from the profits sweated out from workers’ labour over the years. Just look at how little the high-profile failure of Clive Palmer’s Queensland Nickel affected his wealth. After Palmer sacked 237 workers in early 2016, he then infamously refused to pay even the entitlements of the further 800 workers who lost their jobs when the company was liquidated shortly after. Today, despite his company’s collapse and all the pain borne by the axed Queensland Nickel workers, Palmer still manages to be Australia’s eighth richest person with nearly $10 billion in wealth!

Far from “sharing the pain”, many bosses are using the current crisis to, instead, inflict pain on their workers. Knowing that the massive job losses have left those still employed feeling insecure about their jobs and, thus, less willing to challenge bosses, business owners are ramming through attacks on working conditions. The conservative government is right behind them. Last week, industrial relations minister Christian Porter slashed the notice period that bosses have to give before making cuts to pay, penalty rates and leave entitlements to just 24 hours. Meanwhile, some corporate bigwigs are using the cover of the pandemic to push through job cuts. In March, ANZ bosses slashed 230 jobs as part of a long-plotted “cost cutting” drive.

Bosses Putting Workers’ Lives at Risk

Driven by this same pursuit of “cutting costs,” many business owners are putting those workers lucky enough to still have a job at risk of contracting the coronavirus. Qantas has such lax safety systems that even the limp government regulator, Safework NSW, issued the company a mandatory notice on March 2 because Qantas did not ensure that PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) was provided to Sydney ground crew performing the crucial role of cleaning aircraft of wet wipes, used tissues, used face masks and sometimes even vomit and blood. Then the Transport Workers Union exposed how after a Qantas baggage handler at Adelaide Airport was found be infected with COVID-19, Qantas bosses did little to put any protections in place. As a result within 17 days, another 17 baggage handlers, three other Qantas workers and 11 close contacts became infected.

In many cases, bosses are not only putting their workers at risk but placing those they supposedly serve in danger too. At many hospitals and private aged care facilities, bosses have failed to provide workers with adequate PPE; and at best only after the virus has already spread. At a Western Sydney Anglicare nursing home, 14 residents have tragically died from COVID-19 after a worker was infected.

The higher paid strata of administrators of government-run facilities are often little better than their private sector counterparts. In Tasmania, the virus jumped from two infected North West Regional Hospital patients onto medical workers. The lack of adequate PPE, which medical workers have angrily exposed, enabled COVID-19 to then spread like wildfire amongst staff and patients at the hospital and a neighbouring private hospital. Three days ago, the twelfth person died from this particular outbreak that has infected at least 73 health workers.

Since we can’t rely on the bosses to ensure a safe workplace, the workers movement must fight for the following:

Union/worker safety committees at each workplace. These will struggle to ensure that each workplace is safe and has proper pandemic deterrence procedures. If any site is found to be dangerous, workers should walk off the job until the site is made safe. Workers to be fully paid during any such walk-offs.
Temperature testing of all workers and others entering work sites.
All workers at hospitals treating potential COVID-19 patients and at all aged care homes to be supplied with full head-to-toe PPE. The provision of such space-suit style PPE to nurses, janitors and doctors in China is part of why that country was so successful in responding to the COVID-19 threat.
All workers to be granted unlimited paid pandemic leave for COVID-19 treatment or quarantining or for caring for ill people. Instead of bosses blaming workers for outbreaks, they should pay sick leave so that workers don’t get hit with the choice between poverty and risking spreading the disease.
Similarly, all casual workers must be immediately granted permanency. These workers must have all the rights of permanent workers – including sick leave and guaranteed minimum work hours.

Not Bailouts of Capitalists but Jobs For All Workers At Full Pay

All of official society, business owners, media commentators, the ALP “Opposition” and even, to a significant degree, the current leaders of our trade unions – have been cheering the government’s JobKeeper scheme that pays the owners of certain businesses $1,500 per fortnight for each worker that they keep on their payrolls. However, JobKeeper does not apply to most casual workers. Yet it is precisely such workers who have suffered the biggest job cuts since they often work in the hardest hit sectors like hospitality and retail. Also, often working in these areas are international students and visa workers. Yet the scheme will not apply to them either. These people now face destitution as they are not even eligible for the dole. Despicably, Morrison’s response to their plight is to tell these people to “make your way home”! For many this is not even possible as they not only have no money to pay for airfares but often cannot do so due to travel restrictions. The workers movement must actively demand that, to the extent that JobKeeper actually helps workers keep their jobs, it should apply to all workers. Let’s stop our wages being undercut by the forcing of destitute people into illegally-low-paid jobs in the cash economy! Let’s demand:

Immediate permanency, with all the rights of permanent workers, for all casual employees!
Full citizenship rights for everyone here including international students, refugees and visa workers!

Other than those explicitly excluded from JobKeeper, there are many others that the scheme will not save the jobs of. Since it only applies to large companies that have lost more than 50% of their revenue and smaller businesses that have lost at least 30%, workers being axed by firms experiencing lesser downturns will not be helped. Moreover, since the subsidy is barely above minimum wage, many bosses are choosing not to utilise the scheme because they simply don’t want to top up any wages out of their own pockets. Other capitalists are refusing to re-hire cut workers because they wanted to “prune” staff anyway.

There is another huge problem. JobKeeper is financed not from wealthy company owners but from the public budget. And you can bet that it is working class people who are going to be made to cover most of the resulting public debt. We face cuts to public service jobs, the further sell-off of public housing, the return of the dole back to near starvation levels, more health and education services being made user pays and further privatisation. What makes this more terrible is that some of the capitalists receiving JobKeeper subsidies did not actually have plans to cut their workforce because they needed to keep exploiting their workers to protect profits or market share. Thus, many billionaire and multi-millionaire capitalists are now going to receive huge donations from the public budget that amount to a combined multi billion dollars amount. That’s why in counter-position to JobKeeper, we need to fight for jobs for all workers through forcing the bosses to retain more workers than they want to at the expense of their own profits. That requires militant, mass struggle.

Even at this time of pandemic restrictions, strike action is still possible. Last month, MUA-organised Hutchison workers walked off the job for ten days over the company’s callous indifference to the threat of a pandemic spread at its Port Botany terminal. Moreover, social distancing measures will inevitably ease, giving us more freedom to launch the mass actions so urgently needed. We should then fight to stop wealthy business owners planning to permanently shut down operations by holding mass protest occupations of their facilities (while maintaining safe social distancing) to prevent them from selling their assets. However, given that many workers being axed are at smaller sites with less industrial power, the workers movement must also unite behind common demands for laws to ensure jobs for all workers. Let us demand:

A ban on all job cuts or unpaid stand downs by any firm whose total profit over the previous, say seven, years exceeds any current losses.
A ban on all cuts to wages and conditions from pre-pandemic levels.
The forcing of any company still making a profit to increase its number of full-time paid employees by at least five workers for every hundred thousand dollars of monthly profit.
Any business that violates these measures to be confiscated and transferred into public ownership.

Workers are NOT “All in This Together” with the Greedy, Rich Bosses

To wage the desperately needed fightback, the workers movement must change the program that currently leads our unions. Right now, pro-ALP union leaders have completely bought into the “we are all in this together” mantra. They have been cheered on in this by the corporate bigwigs, the right-wing government and media commentators. The ACTU leadership has been so compliant that industrial relations minister Christian Porter called ACTU leader Sally McManus his new BFF! Even the more militant Victorian CFMEU head, John Setka, has cheered the “unprecedented co-operation” with bosses associations saying “For once, we are all in the same boat.”

But far from being “all in the same boat”, the greedy bosses are actually throwing workers off the very boats that these workers built as soon as these boats run into rough waters. It is this same “we are all in the same boat” nonsense that saw the 1980s Accord between unions, bosses and the then ALP government. The Accord was essentially a no-strike pledge by union leaders in exchange for promises of social programs. In reality, The Accord saw the then Hawke and Keating Labor governments preside over the biggest increase in inequality in Australian history. Since then a less overt, but still underlying, “all in the same boat” ideology has seen union leaders, for the most part, shy away from organising militant industrial action – a strategy that has weakened our unions and led to the undermining of working conditions and rampant casualisation of the workforce.

Central to the “we are all in this together” ideology is the myth that workers and bosses share a common “national interest” in promoting the profits of local companies. Thus, the union leadership’s long-term “strategy” to stop job cuts has been to call to protect Australian businesses from imported goods. However, the last couple of months have exposed how utterly bankrupt this protectionist strategy is. For all the recent huge job losses have absolutely nothing to do with overseas competition hurting local businesses. The job cuts have actually been concentrated in sectors – like restaurants, shops, personal care, tourism and gyms – that simply cannot by their very nature be replaced by imports or by overseas contracting. Meanwhile, not only are travel disruptions reducing imports to Australia, those cuts to imports are causing job losses here as Australian businesses are deprived of needed supplies.

So we desperately need to exorcise our union movement of the we are all in this together or common national interest myth that currently haunts it. Our unions need to be re-oriented on a program based on a clear understanding that the interests of the capitalist business owners and those of the working class are at all times counter-posed. At times of crisis, like today, this conflict of interests actually becomes even sharper. Central to such a class struggle understanding is the truth that job losses are not ultimately caused by foreign threats to local business profits but by the greed of capitalists and the irrationality of their system. Thus the fight for jobs for all requires not helping local bosses to make more profit but actually, in a sense, the very opposite: mass struggle to force these bosses to hire more workers at the expense of their profits.

One positive development that lasted for a short period is that after years of focusing on demands to keep out guest workers, our union leaders, albeit not very energetically, did rightly call for JobKeeper to be extended to visa workers and international students. However, this emphasis did not last long at all. Today, Sally McManus and some other union leaders gave legitimacy to a newspaper opinion piece by one of their ALP parliamentary mates calling to cut migration and for local workers to get a “first go at jobs.” The divisive, nationalist article was written by senior federal shadow minister, Kristina Keneally, who sounded a good deal like a Peter Dutton, Pauline Hanson or Donald Trump. Such pitting of Australian workers against international and guest workers, far from saving the jobs of local workers, only divides workers from our true allies – the workers of the world – and, thus, makes the workers movement less able to mobilise effective action to stop job slashing attacks by capitalists. It is high time that our unions strongly reject all divisive, protectionist demands that call for putting local workers ahead of our international worker comrades whether they be calls to slash immigration, demands for more “local content”, demands for “Aussie crews on Aussie ships” or calls to keep out visa workers. Instead, our unions must demand that all those working here (including on ships servicing here), no matter what their nationality, get the highest local wages and conditions, must fight to win full citizenship rights for all visa workers and international students and must make persistent efforts to unite local and international workers against job slashing bosses everywhere in the fight for jobs for all. As the threat of job losses at British magnate Richard Branson’s Virgin shows and the fact that the most powerful Australian capitalists – like James Packer, the Murdochs and Anthony Pratt – have major operations abroad highlights, we need unity and solidarity with our worker sisters and brothers around the world today more than ever.

In waging a fight for jobs for all, the working class must unite in common struggle with all downtrodden layers especially hard hit in recent weeks. Standing by those sleeping the streets, couch-surfing or struggling to pay rent, the workers movement must demand a six-month freeze to all residential rent payments, an immediate end to all public housing sell-offs and the requisitioning of all unoccupied properties of people owning more than three homes and their immediate conversion into low-rent public housing or rent-free housing for the homeless. The workers movement must also stand by Australia’s brutally oppressed Aboriginal people who face extreme racist discrimination at the best of times but who are now, with police having greater powers arising from pandemic restrictions, copping even more racist repression. That means we must strongly stand by homeless Aboriginal people being especially bullied by police. And we must join in the recent, powerful call by the families and friends of Aboriginal victims of deaths in custody to release all of our Aboriginal sisters and brothers who are languishing – now more than ever given the dangerous and repressive covid-19 conditions – in Australia’s many brutal prisons and cruel detention centres.

Don’t Let the Capitalist Rulers Blame Others
for the Suffering and Job Cuts since the Pandemic Hit

Any fightback that the workers movement tries to wage will be undermined if the ruling class succeeds in shifting the blame for the pandemic and job losses onto others. Hard right media shock jocks and coded messages from the government have despicably sought to blame Chinese people. This has led to an explosion in the already alarming number of racist attacks against people of colour in Australia. People of Chinese appearance, including medical workers, have especially been abused and violently attacked. The working class must stamp out such attacks. Workers of Asian background make up an important component of the Australian workers movement and we need to resolutely fight against racism if we are to preserve our own unity and focus the masses on who our enemy actually is. So, while workers rights activists should respect genuine social distancing regulations, when a racist attack is threatened, we should make an exception and take mass action to defend those targeted and to painfully rebuff the perpetrators.

The main way that the capitalist rulers are trying to shift blame for the deaths and economic pain caused by the pandemic is to make ridiculous smears against the People Republic of China (PRC). The fact is that China gave Australia and the world much warning about the COVID-19 threat. Indeed, Australia did not even have a single confirmed case of COVID-19 when China took the unprecedented step of shutting down a whole city of 11 million people to contain the virus. That the virus still spread so widely here is because the Liberal government, with ALP support, in order to underhandedly promote anti-China fears within the Australian population, maintained for a long period restrictions only on travellers from China (and later from South Korea too) while not taking measures then to screen and test the large number of people returning with the virus from Europe, from cruise ships and from the U.S. Furthermore, the capitalist system, in which those who control production only have things made if they can find a way to extract a profit out of it, meant that Australian manufacturers have only in a very limited way switched over to producing pandemic response items like protective suits, medical masks, infra-red thermometers and testing kits. The resulting scarcity of these items has greatly weakened Australia’ response. In the end, these shortages have only been eased after China came to the rescue in recent days with large shipments. So the attempts by Australia’s capitalist regime to blame the PRC are total rubbish. Indeed, the Liberal government’s China-bashing call for a supposed “independent inquiry” into the earliest phase of the pandemic are much like its 2014-2015 Royal Commission into the Trade Unions, a witch-hunt aimed at smearing their target and justifying attacks against it. If we allow the capitalist ruling class to deceive the population into blaming China for their current hardships then the masses will likely stay away from any attempt to resist the capitalist class’ attacks on workers’ jobs and conditions.

There is another reason why the Australian regime and their big brother allies in Washington are so hysterically attacking China over the pandemic. The PRC’s stunning success in responding to the COVID-19 threat, versus on the other hand the seriously flawed response in Australia and the catastrophically botched one in the U.S., has shown the superiority of the PRC’s socialistic system based on public ownership and working class rule. The capitalist rulers around the world are terrified that their own masses will see this and, thus, conclude that socialism is what is needed in their own countries too. Indeed, that is precisely the conclusion that we must draw! For although working class rule in China is bureaucratically deformed and threatened by the presence of a still significant capitalist class, recent events have proven that such a socialist system, even in a flawed form, is far better able to protect the interests of the masses than the chaotic capitalist system. Thus, because the key sectors of the Chinese economy are dominated by public ownership – including banking, construction, ports, airlines, heavy industry, communication and mining – China was able to switch over its economy to building brand new emergency hospitals and pandemic response items in a flash. Moreover, the fact that the Chinese working class, in as imperfect a way as it is, have control of the PRC economy through their state means that the rise in unemployment in China since the pandemic has been relatively miniscule compared to the massive wave of joblessness that we are seeing in the U.S., Europe and Australia. So, yes, we definitely do need to fight here for a system based on public ownership and working class rule. And when business owners respond to our demands for them to retain more employees than is most profitable for them by saying that “this is not practical” then the workers movement must respond: if you capitalists cannot run the economy in a way that provides jobs for all then the economy should not be in your hands, we working class people will take it off you and put it into our own, strong and able, collective hands.

The Western capitalist rulers are right, from their point of view, to fear that the existence of socialistic rule in the world’s most populous country is an existential threat, if only by example, to capitalist rule in their own countries. That is precisely why it is in the interests of working class people and all the oppressed here to stand by socialistic rule in China. For the existence of Red China strengthens our own struggle against capitalist exploitation. So let us oppose the Australian regime’s participation in the provocative U.S.-led naval forays through distant Chinese waters and let us oppose its fulsome political support to counterrevolutionary forces within China – like the yuppy, rich people’s opposition in Hong Kong.

The Capitalists Have Waged Class War on Workers for Decades –
It’s Time to Wage Class War on Them!

For the last several years, most workers have barely received a pay rise even while rents have been rising significantly, electricity costs are climbing steeply and out of pocket medical costs are increasing. In the meantime, company profits have skyrocketed. As a result, the wealth of Australia’s richest 200 people went from $197 billion in 2016 to $342 billion in 2019 – a staggering 74% increase in just three years! But now that some of them have run into choppy waters they are dumping overboard the very workers who produced their spectacular wealth. And then they tell us that “we are all in the same boat together.” How dare they! Workers who have just been axed by their bosses must feel nauseous when they encounter such rubbish as they queue up for hours before opening time outside Centrelink offices while wealthy business owners drive past in their flashy prestige cars.

So let’s completely reject the lie that we are being sold by the big end of town, with the complicity of the current ALP leaders of the workers movement, that “we are all in this together.” Let’s never lose sight of the fact that while it is the pandemic that necessitates social distancing restrictions it is a choice of business owners to lay off or stand down workers without pay rather than pay their workers out of the profits that they have sweated out of these self same workers over many years. Let’s build mass working class struggle against the bosses to force them to re-hire retrenched or stood down without pay workers as well as all longer-term unemployed workers. And if James Packer complains that he can’t afford this, we should demand that he sell the new super yacht that he bought eleven months ago. That alone would give him enough money to fully pay all his stood-down Crown workers for nearly four months. Let’s win jobs for all through waging class war on the very exploiting class that has been waging a one-sided class war on us for the last three and a half decades!

Anti-Capitalism, China, Public Housing

The Connection between Political Donations and the Sell-Off of Public Housing in Inner City Sydney

May 17, 2019

Stop the Sell-Off of Public Housing – Massively Increase It Instead!

The Connection between Political Donations and the Sell-Off of Public Housing in Inner City Sydney

1 May 2019 – A look at the registry of political donations to the NSW Liberal Party shows that the governing party in NSW accepted donations from real estate companies just when government decisions related to these companies’ participation in the government’s sell-off of public housing in inner city Sydney were being made. In each case the rich businesses making the donations ended up getting favourable government decisions. Those decisions have resulted in their wealthy owners making or standing to make mega bucks. This information provides hard data that helps confirm what people seriously looking at the public housing sell-off already know: that the NSW government’s sell off of public housing in the Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point area was not motivated by any concern for the interests of the working class majority of NSW but instead was driven by the wish to satisfy the interests of rich business owners.

It is now over five years since the NSW state government announced that it was selling off nearly 300 public housing dwellings in the Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point area. Sadly they have already completed their sell-offs of public housing in Millers Point – except for 24 properties that they reluctantly agreed to maintain as public housing in a minor concession to the demands of the tenants movement. They are yet to sell-off the Sirius Building which formerly had 79 public housing units there. However, the government has already driven off all the former public housing tenants from that building – many of whom were elderly women. The real estate agents that the Coalition government have contracted to sell-off Sirius is Savills (NSW) Pty Ltd. On 7 December 2017, the NSW government and Savills first publicly announced that Savills had been awarded the contract to sell Sirius and opened registrations of interest for the building to developers and investors [1]. A filed Major Political Donor form shows that just over nine months earlier, on 27 February 2017 – that is, right in the period when one would expect the government to have been considering which real estate company should be given the contract to sell Sirius – Savills donated nearly $4,000 to the NSW Division of the Liberal Party [2]. The $3,960 donation was made at an “Alan Jones Luncheon” – yikes!

Savills and the NSW Liberal government would, no doubt, have liked to be able to respond that Savills are a regular donor and the timing of that nearly $4,000 donation is just pure coincidence. Except that Savills are not a regular donor to the NSW Liberal Party! Not at all! A search done on the NSW Electoral Commission registry of political donations [3] shows that in the almost ten year period from August 2008 – when political donations were first recorded in detail – until the end of June 2018 (i.e. the end of the last reporting period before this article was written), Savills never made any other donation to the NSW Liberal Party at all. In other words, over at least a ten year period, Savills never donated a solitary cent to the NSW Liberal Party, except around the time when the Liberal government was considering whether to grant them the lucrative contract to sell Sirius. That makes that nearly $4,000 donation highly questionable!

However, if the above referred donation did indeed facilitate Savills winning the contract to sell Sirius, it was a “good” “investment” from the greedy point of view of capitalist bosses. After all, with average commissions in Sydney at around roughly 2.2% and an expected sale price for the building of around $150 million, Savills would stand to make about $3.3 million from the sale. So, if a $3,960 donation helps to make $3.3 million in revenue … that’s some hefty rate of return! There is, additionally, an interesting side point to this donation concerning a possible attempt to conceal the timing of the donation – see Note [4] at the end of this article for a discussion of this possible issue.

Savills bosses are not the only people that stand to profit from the sell-off of public housing in the Millers Point and Rocks area and who made donations to the NSW Liberal Party. While Savills have the contract to sell the Sirius building, more than 85% of the $608 million worth of public housing in Millers Point was sold off by McGrath Real Estate [5]. And just like Savills, McGrath Real Estate also made big donations to the NSW Liberal Party just around the time when they were awarded lucrative contracts to auction the public housing units that the state government was putting up for sale. In particular, within the space of 10 days between 26 January 2015 and 6 February 2015, McGrath Real Estate entities made two separate donations to the NSW Liberal Party totalling $2,210 [6]. These donations were just around the time when the auction of public housing dwellings in Millers Point was being ramped up and the government was about to determine which estate agents received the bountiful contracts for further auctions (see for example [7]). Telling, too, are the results of a search done on the Electoral Commission registry for any McGrath Real Estate donations to the Liberal Party in the almost ten year period up until the June 2018 end of the latest reported disclosure period. This search revealed that McGrath entities made no other donations whatsoever to the NSW Liberal Party during those ten years. In other words, just as with Savills, the NSW Liberal Party only received donations from McGrath Real Estate around the time when they awarded the latter lucrative government contracts to be agents for the sell-off of inner city public housing. And again, this fact only makes the receipt of those particular donations even more questionable. Of course, from the point of view of the profit-hungry McGrath Real Estate bosses, donating to the governing party would make sense if that would help “facilitate” the winning of contracts to sell off the public housing. Assuming a typical commission rate of 2.2%, the contracts they were awarded to auction off Millers Point public housing would have netted them over $11 million in revenue.

Public Housing Sell-Off: A Boon for Real Estate Bosses, Developers and Speculators,
A Disaster for Working Class People

It is not only real estate agent bosses that have profited handsomely from the sell-off of public housing in the Millers Point and Rocks areas of Sydney. The main direct beneficiaries of this anti-working class privatisation were the wealthy investors and speculators who bought up the sold off properties. One of these is Shane Moran, the owner of ultra-high-end aged care operator, Provectus Care. Shane Moran is one of the heirs to the Moran family fortune and lives in a 60-room mansion in Darling Point called Swifts which is valued at between $50 million to $100 million! In late February 2016, Moran bought one of the largest sold off public properties in Millers Point, Darling House, for $7.7 million. Darling House had been a retirement home for low income elderly people. However, soon after the government announced its intention to sell-off all public housing in Millers Point, it scrapped a 20 year agreement that enabled the community-run facility to have lower rents, forcing the facility to close. After buying the property, Shane Moran made no secret of his intention to turn the building into a high-end aged care facility for the rich [8]. A similar facility he runs at Rose Bay charges an upfront fee of more than $2 million for each resident and then a “service fee” of $104 per day! So what happened to Darling House actually typifies exactly what the sell-off of public housing in Millers Point is all about. Here, a community-run aged care home for low income people was closed and has been replaced by an aged care facility affordable only to the very wealthy and where its filthy rich owner will stand to make huge profits (by the way, there are questions to be asked about donations to the NSW Liberal Party made by an elder brother and possibly other relatives of Shane Moran – and possibly, again, by Shane Moran himself – in the five month period after he first publicly announced in September 2016 that he was applying for planning approval to turn Darling House into a high-end aged care facility – see [9]).

**Left:** Filthy rich businessman Shane Moran outside the 60-room mansion in Darling Point where he lives, which is valued at between $50 million to $100 million! Moran is set to get even richer after, as part of the public housing sell-off in inner city Sydney, he bought up a community-run aged care facility for low-income elderly people in order to convert it into a boutique facility for the very wealthy. **Right:** One of the growing number of elderly people forced to sleep rough in the streets of Sydney. *Photo credit (photo on Left): Richard Dobson*

The sell-off of public housing in inner city Sydney has been bad news for working class people full stop. Firstly, the forced relocation out of the area of the former public housing tenants has dispersed and destroyed a once close-knit and vibrant community. Many of the former tenants became despondent and some have died prematurely and even committed suicide (for a detailed scientific study of the effects of the sell-off on the former tenants refer to the recently published book by Professor at the UTS Institute for Public Policy and Governance, Alan Morris [10]).

Secondly, contrary to the NSW government’s devious claim that the inner city public housing sell-off was aimed at raising funds for the construction of more public housing elsewhere, the truth is that the sell-off of public housing in Millers Points and the Rocks was actually simply part of a broader government agenda to slash the amount of public housing throughout the state. This is proven by official government figures (see Note [11]). They show that in the three year, 2014-2017 period [12] from when the removal of public housing tenants from Millers Point and the Rocks commenced to when the forced relocation of tenants from the area was basically completed, the number of public housing dwellings in NSW was cut by 584 dwellings! In other words, in addition to the 189 properties that were eventually sold off in Millers Point, a net further 395 public housing dwellings were sold off elsewhere in the state in just that three year period! So much for the government’s claim that for every public housing dwelling sold off in the inner city, it would finance the construction of four to five new public housing dwellings elsewhere! Indeed, as well as in Millers Point and the Rocks, the right-wing NSW state government has been privatising public housing in Parramatta, Hurstville, Greenacre, Panania, Campsie, Fairfield, Wentworthville, Lalor Park and Canley Vale.

The effect of this gouging of public housing is even worse when one takes population increase into account. In that case we see that relative to the population size, the NSW Liberal government has slashed the number of public housing places by an equivalent of 5,164 properties in just three years! This is despite the truth that higher immigration actually makes it easier for the government to not only increase the amount of public housing available but makes it easier for them to actually increase the proportion of public housing. This is because not only do immigrants, by paying taxes, increase the public funds available to finance public housing construction and increase the labour resources available to build public housing but by increasing population numbers they allow economies of scale to kick in and, thereby, make housing construction more efficient. The plummeting in the proportion of people with public housing has absolutely nothing to do with immigration but is, rather, a political decision by a wealthy ruling class that is driven by a desire to further increase its own fortunes at the expense of working class people.

With less and less low-rent housing available, no wonder more and more people are being forced to sleep out on the streets of Sydney. Among those finding it hardest to afford rents are low-income, single parent families with young children. Driven into poverty by the combined measures of the Howard Liberal and the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Labor governments that threw low-income sole parents off the Parenting Payment and into the much lower paying Newstart Allowance and with childcare unaffordable, many of these parents are forced to seek work in insecure jobs in the gig economy or as casuals in order to have the flexible work hours needed to look after their children. This means that the number of work hours they get fluctuates from week to week and they are often not able to generate enough income to both pay rent and to properly feed and clothe themselves and their children. And the fact that wages are not keeping up with prices makes the housing situation of low income workers even more precarious. Meanwhile, one of the combined effects of the gutting of the sole parenting payment and the slashing of public housing is to increase domestic violence against women. For these measures mean that low-income women relying financially on a male partner who is abusive are confronted with the unbearable choice of either going out on their own and living an impoverished life without a guaranteed roof over their heads and those of their children or staying with their partner and trying to endure the attacks.

The drastic slashing in the proportion of public housing available, in the end, hurts all those renting in the lower and even middle range of the rental market. For with so little low-rent public housing available, landlords are able to jack up rents knowing that lower income people have nowhere else to go. Anglicare Australia’s annual Rental Affordability Snapshot released a few days ago showed that in a survey of 69,485 properties listed for rent across Australia, there was not one single available property that would be affordable to rent for a single person on Newstart or Youth Allowance in any major city or regional centre [13]! The survey also found that only 2 per cent of rentals Australia-wide were affordable for a single person on the minimum wage working full time. Rental accommodation is extremely unaffordable for low wage workers even if they live in working class neighbourhoods half an hour to 45 minutes by train from Sydney city. One such region is the Cumberland local government area which includes suburbs like Auburn, Berala, Guildford and Greystanes and parts of Granville, Merrylands and Fairfield. There, even according to the government’s own figures, the median rent for a one bedroom apartment was $345 per week in the December 2018 quarter [14]. This compares with an, after tax, minimum wage for those lucky enough to have a full-time job of $642 per week. In other words, one of the hundreds of thousands of workers on the minimum wage, but lucky enough to have a full-time job, who rents a one bedroom unit in a relatively cheap suburb some half to three quarters of an hour by train from Sydney city, has to pay much more than half their income on rent! Yet such a worker does not even qualify to get on the NSW social housing waiting list! The maximum income a single person can earn before being deemed too “well off” to qualify for social housing in NSW is currently only $625 per week [15]. The reality is that there is such a dearth of public housing that the government has made the eligibility criteria to even get on the social housing waiting list incredibly tough. Of course, if such a low paid worker does not have a full-time job they could get on the social housing waiting list. Yet they will then be totally stuffed as they end up having to pay around three quarters of their income on rent while they wait the average ten years or so to finally get into social housing!

Mobilise the Working Class Movement and All the Poor to Fight for Public Housing

Governments of all stripes in Australia have been selling off public housing for several related reasons. For one they want to help their rich developer, speculator and real estate boss mates. Secondly, they want to spend less and less of the public budget on the services that working class people need the most – like public housing, public health care, TAFE and public schools. These ruling class politicians would rather save the money to finance tax cuts for the very rich or spend the money on corporate welfare – like when the NSW Liberal state government granted $60 million to the job-slashing Bluescope Steel owners. Thirdly, the slashing of public housing is part of a push by the capitalist rulers to make life more and more miserable for unemployed and underemployed workers. They do this by not only reducing access to public housing but also by keeping the Newstart Allowance at cruelly low levels, introducing punitive schemes forcing unemployed people to do unpaid work and rolling out “income management” schemes that prevent unemployed people from determining how they will spend the meagre payments that they receive. The aims of all these draconian measures are two-fold. For one, by making life so hard for job seekers, they force the latter to accept jobs that have terrible working conditions and very low – often illegally low – wages. Additionally, by making the prospect of life after losing one’s job so unbearably miserable, the ruling class hope that they can intimidate workers – fearful of being sacked by the boss or being identified as one of the staunch unionists who will always be top of the bosses’ list to be axed in the event of retrenchments – from participating in the union fight for rights at work. That is why government attacks on public housing – like other measures which target the poor and unemployed – are very much assaults on our trade unions. And that is why the union movement must take up the struggle for public housing as a key part of the struggle to defend workers rights.

Current and former Millers Point public housing tenants and the many trade unionists and other supporters of public housing that stood by them did wage a determined struggle against the sell-off of public housing in the area. Their efforts did much to boost the broader on the streets movement in defence of public housing that had begun several years earlier when activists demanding a massive increase in public housing held a November 2009 protest rally outside the Sydney office of the then federal housing minister (in the then Rudd ALP government), Tanya Plibersek. From 2014 onwards, those supporting the Millers Point public housing struggle and those involved in already established campaigns for public housing based in the Illawara, Auburn and elsewhere started attending each other’s protest actions. And although the campaign did not end up being powerful enough to prevent the destruction of public housing in Millers Point it did invigorate budding pro-public housing campaigns elsewhere like the movement to stop the slashing of public housing in Waterloo.

**11 October 2014**: Public housing tenants from Millers Point join with activists organising campaigns to oppose the privatisation of public housing in the Illawarra and in Western Sydney (including Trotskyist Platform supporters) at a protest against the auction of a public housing home in Bulli near Wollongong. *Photo credit: Adam McLean*

With the situation increasingly desperate and with submissions to government bodies and other forms of “official” protest being ignored, the campaign turned militant in 2017. First, in May 2017, dozens of trade unionists, public housing tenants and other supporters of public housing blockaded 32 High Street in Millers Point to try and prevent the sheriff from evicting the then public housing tenant living there, staunch public housing activist, Peter Muller. The movement was able to hold the sheriff at bay for the first day but before dawn the next morning the sheriffs and police raided the home to enforce the eviction. Then on 6 August 2017, scores of trade unionists, current and former public housing tenants and other supporters of public housing carried out a powerful occupation of vacant public housing dwellings at 78 to 80 High St, Millers Point. Activists adorned the occupied homes with banners emphasising the struggle against the sell-off of public housing as well as with the flags of the unions supporting the Millers Point tenants’ struggle – the MUA and the CFMEU. Those houses had been slated for sell-off to wealthy speculators, landlords and capitalist developers after the government had driven off the public housing tenants who once lived there. The occupation demanded that the occupied houses and all unoccupied public housing dwellings in the area be given to the homeless or to those on public housing waiting lists. Later in the evening of the August 6 occupation, after numbers had dwindled somewhat five hours into the action, a heavy contingent of riot cops raided the occupation site. They also arrested four activists participating in the struggle.

Although heavy-handed state repression crushed this protest occupation and the earlier anti-eviction struggle at 32 High Street, both these actions – and the 6 August 2017 protest occupation in particular – really did scare the government. And although they are never going to admit it, these struggles almost certainly did compel the government to somewhat slow down their plans to slash public housing throughout the state compared to what they had been previously planning. We need more staunch struggles to stop the sell-off of public housing. We need new and more powerful versions of the May 2017 anti-eviction blockade and the August 2017 protest occupation. We must locate the fight against the privatisation of public housing as part of the wider struggle against the ruling class’ attacks on all public services and a struggle against their attacks on our trade unions.

**6 August 2017, Millers Point, Sydney**: Houses in High St occupied by trade unionists, current and former public housing tenants and other supporters of public housing. The powerful action demanded that these vacant public housing dwellings be made available to those on the public housing waiting list or the homeless. We need more and more powerful actions like this to reverse the sell-off of public housing and smash all the attacks on services that working class people need the most.

We need to not only put a stop to the sell-off of public housing but need to fight for a massive increase in the amount of public housing. There is a huge shortfall in the amount of public housing places. In the ten year period from 2007 to 2017, the former NSW ALP government and the current conservative NSW government slashed the amount of public housing in the state by 10% even as the population grew [16]. There are well over fifty thousand households on the official waiting list for public housing in NSW. There are even more who are eligible for public housing but have not gotten on the list because the wait times are so ridiculous. Meanwhile, there are literally hundreds of thousands of other households who need low-rent public housing but can’t even get on the waiting list because the entry criteria to the waiting list is so strict.

What’s Most Harmful about these Political Donations?

We should not let anyone downplay the seriousness of the issue of the governing party in NSW accepting donations from real estate companies just when this government is making decisions related to these companies’ participation in the sell-off of public housing. From the standpoint of the interests of working class people, the most harmful thing about these donations is that they acted to place pressure upon the government to maintain its course to sell off the public housing. Put another way, accepting donations from those who had very direct vested interests in seeing the public housing privatisations go through made the Liberal Party less willing to back down and offer concessions in the face of the determined movement opposing the sell-off.

Secondly, the dodgy donations add to the stench of corruption that has surrounded NSW and its mainstream politicians. Let’s not forget that several ministers in this NSW Liberal government have already been forced to resign because of corruption-related actions, like improper receipt of “gifts” – not the least being former premier, Barry O’Farrell. And we all know about the corrupt activities of several influential members of the former ALP state government. Meanwhile, it is precisely in the property sector where corruption is most rife. The industry at its top is ridden with not only dubious links to politicians but is plagued with violent rivalries and connections to organised crime.

Thirdly, and most obviously, the donations were meant to influence government decisions on which real estate firms would be granted the lucrative contracts to auction/sell off the public housing properties. Notwithstanding that the entire sell-off was terribly harmful to the former tenants and to all working class people, the fact is that any improperly influenced government decision on who should conduct the property sales could mean a big loss to what is supposedly “public funds.” Say, for example that these donations to the Liberal Party enticed the government to accept a bid to conduct the sales from real estate companies that charged, say, a 0.3% higher commission than a rival bid that the government may have gone with. Given that the total sell-off is going to amount to around $750 million then that would mean that over $22 million ends up being lost from public funds; or, rather, transferred from the public budget to the bank accounts (and eventually the glitzy prestige cars and swank holiday mansions) of high-flying real estate bosses. With that $22 million how many badly needed extra public hospital beds could be provided? Or how many extra public housing dwellings could be made available?

This then leads to a still more crucial question? That is, aside from the fact that the entire sell-off was unjust and the donations by the real estate companies arranging the sales highly questionable, why should private businesses have been engaged in the sell-off at all? More fundamentally, why are private business owners allowed to profit from the government provision – and in this case sell-off – of public housing? The answer is that there is such a tiny public sector in this country – and much of the little that once did exist has been privatised by Liberal and ALP governments alike over the last three and a half decades – that there are few publicly owned operations set up to perform the required tasks. That is why from most levels of the construction work, to the provision of maintenance and repair of public housing, to, in this case, the sell-off of public housing, private businesses are getting contracts for work related to public housing. That means that public funds are flowing into the pockets of big corporate shareholders and other wealthy business owners. Herein is a key reason why the provision of public housing is so inadequate in Australia. In addition to anti-working class governments being unwilling to provide sufficient funds for public housing, the funds that are actually dispensed produce an inadequate number of dwellings because so much of the money ends up being skimmed off by private business contractors at every level.

For an Economy Based on Public Ownership
of All Key Industries, Finance and Infrastructure

To highlight the problem here of so much of the funds allocated for public housing being siphoned off to wealthy private businesses, it is worth contrasting this reality in capitalist Australia with a socio-economic system based on public ownership and seeing how the latter delivers public housing. Such a system exists in the world’s most populous country – and Australia’s largest trading partner – the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Although pro-market reforms over the last 40 years have created a sizable private sector in China as well as a class of capitalist exploiters, the public sector still plays the dominant role in the PRC. Some 90% of the PRC’s biggest 100 companies are stated owned, including all her biggest banks, her main oil/gas companies, biggest construction companies, ports, shipping, power producers, main airlines, biggest steel producers etc (and even many of her biggest real estate firms). As a result, every stage of public housing provision in China – from the banks providing finance if needed, to the construction companies building the housing to the steel, cement and plate glass manufacturers providing building supplies – is dominated by publicly owned enterprises. This means that, unlike in Australia, little of the public funds allocated for public housing ends up in the bank accounts of wealthy private business owners. Even if one of the state-owned banks providing credit for public housing construction were to charge too high an interest rate or a state-owned building materials supplier were to set too high prices, all this ends up as higher profits for state-owned firms and these profits then get recycled back into the public budget … to be available for more public housing construction. This is why the PRC has been so spectacularly able to increase the amount of public housing in the country over the last decade or so. From 2008 to 2017, the PRC provided 64 million additional public housing dwellings in urban areas! As a result, while the proportion of people with access to public housing in Australia’s urban areas has fallen to just one in every thirty households, in the PRC’s urban areas around one in four people now are living in one of its various forms of public housing.

Of course, since a system based on public ownership of key sectors of the economy – that is a socialist system – favours working class people, the capitalist rulers are not going to allow such a system to arise without putting up tenacious resistance. Indeed, such a socio-economic system can only be secured if the working class sweep away the capitalists from power and erect their own workers state. In China, the toiling classes had to make a massive revolution in 1949 to enable her to build a system in which public ownership plays the backbone role. Not only does this socialistic system mean that funds allocated for public housing are actually used for this purpose rather than partially for enriching private capitalists, the fact that working class people – in a tenuous and fragile way to be sure – have control over the PRC state means that there is actually a political will to provide public housing in China. The main slogan of the PRC’s housing policy is: “Houses are for living in and not for speculation.” As a result, while public housing continues to be sold off here in Australia, in the PRC the campaign to provide public housing continues to surge forward. Last year, China’s southern metropolis of Shenzhen decreed that from then onwards at least 60% of all new housing in the city must be public housing [17]. The PRC authorities went further when setting the housing policy for the Xiongan New Area – the new city of 5 million people being built 100 km from Beijing. There the PRC has decreed that every single house in what they have deemed to be a model city for the future must be public housing [18].

Another reason why the PRC’s socialistic state has been able to successfully undertake its drive to increase public housing is because it and the PRC public sector enterprises’ Communist Party of China committees – that have decisive oversight power over such companies – compel the leaders of state-owned enterprises to meet such social goals. In other words, the bonuses and future promotion opportunities of the directors and CEOs of China’s public sector enterprises depend on how well they have met declared socially important targets – like increasing the amount of public housing and like the main goal that has been dominating PRC political life over the last few years, the drive to ensure that no person in that country is living in extreme poverty by 2020. As a result, while the bosses of Australian banks will use any means necessary to satisfy their big shareholders’ demands for ever high profits, in the PRC the banks are falling over themselves to lend to public housing projects. Figures show that in China’s capital city, Beijing, in the first half of last year, two out of every three yuan of bank loans for real estate went into public housing development [19]. The same imperatives are also pushing the PRC’s big state-owned developers. Thus, for example, Beijing Investment Group, the state-owned builder and operator of Beijing’s Olympic village for the 2022 Winter Olympics has declared that the entire village will be turned into public rental housing at the completion of the 2022 Winter Olympics [20]. All this is why the struggle for public housing in Australia is intertwined with the broader fight here for a system based on public ownership under workers’ rule.

**The design for the Olympic village for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.** The village is being built and operated by Beijing Investment Group – one of China’s big publicly-owned developers. The socialistic, stateowned enterprise has announced that after the completion of the Olympics the entire village will become public rental housing.

What the Donations Made to the NSW Liberal Party
Say about “Democracy” in Capitalist Australia

The fact that the NSW Liberal Party only received donations from the two real estate companies around the time when they awarded these companies lucrative government contracts and never received donations from them at any other time over at least the last ten years highlights the reality of who is really running this country: it is not actually the politicians themselves but the rich business owners. When you see who are the biggest political donors to the major political parties you see how much influence these capitalist business owners have. Among the biggest donations to the Australian Liberal Party for 2017-2018 (the last year that donations have been publicised) [22] include $250,000 from the ANZ Bank, $110,000 from oil and gas giant Woodside and $150,000 from the trust account of Australia’s richest family, the Pratt family, owners of Visy cardboard. During the same period, the ANZ Bank and Woodside also made donations of identical size to the ALP and Macquarie Telecom donated over $105,000 to the ALP [23].

It is not only through donations to political parties that rich capitalists control the direction of Australia. They also use direct political advertising to push their agenda when they need to. Most infamously, in 2010 mining billionaires Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest as well as other wealthy corporate bosses ran a massive advertising campaign on commercial TV and major newspapers that successfully gutted a proposed tax on mining super-profits and helped bring down the then prime minister who promoted the tax, Kevin Rudd. More subtly but just as insidiously, capitalist tycoons donate a fraction of the massive profits that they exploit out of workers’ labour to various arts, entertainment and sporting causes to ensure that popular culture is in accord with their interests and to curry favour with the public.

Notoriously, corporations also hire expensive lobbyists to influence political decision making. They especially seek out former politicians to ensure that their lobbyists have close contacts with the political administrators of the state. Moreover, because the corporate elite control the economy they are able to ensure that politicians eager for lucrative post-politics jobs in the corporate world dutifully serve the corporate bigwigs whilst they are still in parliament. All these different means of control and manipulation of politics was used, for example, by billionaire James Packer’s Crown Corporation to ensure that laws and regulations that could have curbed its plan to build an exclusive hotel/casino resort at Sydney’s Barangaroo melted away [24]. Amongst the board of directors of Crown at the time was former Minister of Communications in the Howard government, Helen Coonan. Packer also employed former ALP heavies Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar as lobbyists for his casino project. Meanwhile on 12 November 2013, the very eve of the day that the NSW parliament rammed through special amendments to the Casino Control Act specifically to support Crown’s Barangaroo project, Packer ostentatiously announced a $60 million donation to various Sydney arts, theatre, opera and orchestra institutions by both his Crown Group and himself personally. All this has much relevance to the sell-off of public housing in the Millers Point area. As was strongly implied by a statement in October 2012 by the then NSW Finance Minister himself, part of what was driving the government’s (then proposed) sell-off was the need to not have working class people in the area “in the context” of ensuring that the wealthy clientele who will frequent the resort that Packer expects to make billions from do not have a “bad view” [25].

Then there is of course the reality that, from Rupert Murdoch to billionaire Channel Seven owner Kerry Stokes, the media is owned and thus controlled by capitalist moguls. Thus, media reporting is heavily biased towards the interests of the big end of town. Any political party that stands uncompromisingly for the interests of working class people would face massive attacks from the mainstream media not to mention from direct advertising from big business and from the numerous cultural organisations and NGOs directly and indirectly financed by the capitalists. That is why the mythical “one person one vote” that supposedly exists in Australia is in reality more like “one million dollars, one million votes”! And it is not that “democracy in Australia has flaws” or even that “it is broken.” Thus far real “democracy” has never existed in the post-1788 history of this country. Ever since Aboriginal people were murderously dispossessed by the new colonial ruling class, the system the latter established was never meant to give everyone an equal say: the figment of “democracy” was always only ever intended to enable the wealthy rural and urban business owners to hold real power while tricking the masses into believing that they are really in control.

Even if a party that genuinely stood for the interests of working class people were able to overcome all the bias and disadvantage it would face and get elected to office, that in itself would not bring about decisive change. This is because the state machinery and its personnel that such a government would then formally administer are itself tied by a thousand threads to the big end of town capitalists. We have seen this throughout the sell-off of public housing in inner city Sydney itself. Bureaucrats from Family and Community Services showed a high-handed attitude to the tenants that they were putting pressure on to relocate. The judges in the rental tribunals hearing cases of tenants objecting to the particular places they were being pushed to move into were unsympathetic. Meanwhile, when police raided the 6 August 2017 protest occupation in Millers Point they were not only “following orders” but seemed to enjoy repressing the pro-working class, pro-public housing action. The police inspector in charge threatened violence against protesters shortly before the raid:

“… if these police have to go in, it’s a contact sport. They will be looking to protect themselves and if someone is injured as a result of them ensuring their safety – unfortunately it does happen.”

When police then forcibly dragged the evicted public housing tenant, Peter Muller, from the front of the occupied building, they used unnecessary force and caused permanent injury to his left wrist which now hampers his work as an electrician. Furthermore, after seizing another activist that they arrested (who happens to be a Trotskyist Platform supporter) and dragging him around the corner away from the view of other protesters (other than for a previous arrestee who witnessed the events from inside the back of a police paddy wagon), policed proceeded to bend his wrist back painfully for extended periods, on at least two occasions, even though he was offering zero resistance at the time. Indeed this violent police operation had such little legal basis that these two activists after pleading Not Guilty to charges had their charges quashed by a magistrate after she found that the entire police raid was unlawful.

The fact is that the enforcement personnel of Australian state institutions have been recruited, trained, nurtured and shaped to serve the interests of the wealthy big property owning class over those of the working class masses. That is why any elected political party that in any meaningful way intends to serve working class interests would immediately face sabotage and non-compliance from the state organs that it has been elected to nominally head. Such a party would then face two options: to either back down on its agenda (which is what usually happens) or to try and continue in which case it would be overthrown by the state organs in a coup as happened to the elected leftist government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. That is why the road to winning improvements in the lives of working class people lies not through changes enacted by Australia’s “democratic institutions” but through mass struggle – union strikes, picket lines, street marches, blockades, protest occupations – the methods that have won us the gains that we have won here in the past. We, of course, do need a political party of the working class. But not one that, like the ALP, seeks to administer the “democratic system” but rather one that seeks to mobilise the masses in grass-roots struggle independently of all the capitalists and their state institutions with the aim of winning concessions from the capitalist enemy today and seizing state power tomorrow.

Working Class People Need a Party That No Capitalist Would Want to Donate to

Although the ALP, just like the Liberals, receives donations from corporations and their capitalist owners, the ALP is not identical to the Coalition parties. The ALP also receives big donations from our trade unions – that is, from working class organisations representing millions of workers. And while the membership of the Liberal Party is dominated by small and big-time capitalist exploiters of labour as well as yuppy wanna-be capitalist business owners, the ALP’s rank and file are largely working class people. The problem, however, is that the ALP’s program to “serve” its working class base is to try and make only small reforms that will not overly upset the capitalists. Although the ALP is prepared to irritate some big end of town high fliers, they still crave the latter’s overall acceptance. Intimidated by and refusing to challenge the capitalist power that thoroughly dominates Australian society, the ALP is determined to ensure that they do not face excessive opposition from the big end of town so that they will be able to administer the capitalist state in an orderly fashion when in government. We see this in the lead up to the upcoming federal elections. The ALP has promised some small worthwhile measures to improve dental care for pensioners financed in part by cracking down somewhat on negative gearing tax concessions for wealthy property speculators. But they refuse to support any increase whatsoever in public housing. Instead, they have an “affordable housing for renters” platform that will only provide a drop in the ocean of the amount of lower rent accommodation that is needed, will only guarantee a rent level that is just 20% below the exorbitant market rents and which is centred on a Liberal Party-like plan to give subsidies to private housing operators [26]. Indeed, this shabby “affordable housing” program is very similar to that of the NSW Liberal Berejiklian government!

Since it has no program to challenge capitalist power, large sections of the corporate elite including the banks, telecommunications firms and resource companies continue to accept the ALP (even as some hard right-wing sections of the ruling class like the Murdoch family are at the moment against Labor) to the point that they even make large donations to the ALP. Such a party should not be supported by working class people in any way. We need, instead, a workers party that will not limit its program to what is tolerated by the capitalists. Such a party not only fights today for a massive increase in public housing and for forcing bosses to, at the expense of their profits, increase their hiring of permanent workers but has a vision for a future socialist society that will guarantee not only secure jobs for all but will ensure that all the basic services that working class people need the most – public housing, aged care, 24 hour child care, public health and dental care, public schools, TAFE and universities and public transport – are available to all for free. Such a party seeks not to win the acceptance of the capitalists but, instead, seeks to mobilise the working class masses in struggle against the exploiting class with a view to preparing a fight to challenge capitalist power. Such a party would not only refuse to accept donations from corporate bigwigs, it would also be a party that no capitalist exploiter in their right mind would want to donate to.

Notes:

[1] Savills website, Start of a New Era for Sydney’s Iconic Sirius Building, 7 December 2017, https://www.savills.com.au/_news/article/109969/157512-0/12/2017/start-of-a-new-era-for-sydney-s-iconic-sirius-building (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[2] Electoral Commission NSW website, Disclosure Details for Donor SAVILLS (NSW) PTY LTD, Disclosure period 1/07/2016 – 30/06/2017, http://searchdecs.elections.nsw.gov.au/Details.aspx?EFID=a0S6F00000mIUUsUAO&ID1=0016F000028XgSbQAK&RPID=2017H1 (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[3] Electoral Commission NSW, DISCLOSURES LODGED, Search for disclosure information, http://searchdecs.elections.nsw.gov.au/search.aspx (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[4] Although the Major Political Donor form filed by Savills lists the donation as being made on 27 February 2018 (see: http://searchdecs.elections.nsw.gov.au/Documents/FD2018-158.pdf), the donation is listed in the earlier 1/07/2016 to 30/06/2017 disclosure period (http://searchdecs.elections.nsw.gov.au/Details.aspx?EFID=a0S6F00000mIUUsUAO&ID1=0016F000028XgSbQAK&RPID=2017H1). That 1/07/2016 to 30/06/2017 disclosure shows that the Savills donation was actually made in February 2017 and not February 2018. This seems correct as the declaration was made on 21 September 2017, i.e. well before the February 2018 date that the Savills major political donor form lists the donation as being made. Moreover, the Receipt Number of the donation tallies with a donation made in February 2017 and not February 2018. So an “error” has been made by either a Savills officer or a Liberal Party official by detailing in the Major Political Donor form the donation as being made a year later than it actually was. In of itself this is not a huge deal. From the aspect of our key point that Savills made a big donation to the NSW Liberal Party around the time period when the latter party in government was awarding it the lucrative contract to sell Sirius, it matters little whether the donation was actually made in late February 2017 or late February 2018 – i.e. either eight and a bit months before the announcement that Savills had been awarded the contract or two and a bit months after the announcement. What does matter is if there has been a conscious attempt to conceal the timing of the donation. In particular, what if either Savills or the Liberal Party deliberately made a “clerical error” and put the date of the donation as February 2018 rather than February 2017 to ensure that the donation appears to have been made after the government announced that Savills had been awarded the Sirius sale contract rather than being made in the period when the government decision about the Sirius contract was being considered. Now we do not have any concrete evidence to say that this is what actually happened. However, given all the corruption that has taken place in NSW, the deviant processes that have surrounded the inner city public housing sell-off and the associated regulatory approvals of James Packer’s luxury casino-hotel resort at Barangaroo and the dodgy context of the Savills donation itself, we would not be surprised if the apparent incorrect dating of the Savills donation is more than just an innocent clerical error. Of course, regardless of whether or not there has been a conscious attempt to conceal the donation’s timing, the key broader overall point stands: that the NSW Liberal Party accepted a nearly $4,000 donation from Savills around the time when it would have been considering whether to grant that real estate business the multi-million dollars’ worth contract to sell the Sirius building.

[5] Eliot Hastie, REB, Final Millers Point tranche sold, 8 November 2018, https://www.realestatebusiness.com.au/breaking-news/17927-final-millers-point-tranche-sold (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[6] Electoral Commission NSW website, Disclosure Details for Party, The Liberal Party of Australia New South Wales Division, Disclosure period 1/07/2014 – 30/06/2015, http://searchdecs.elections.nsw.gov.au/Details.aspx?EFID=a0S6F00000qI37dUAC&ID1=0019000000twe3RAAQ&RPID=2015H1 (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[7] NSW Government Finance, Services & Innovation website, Millers Point Properties Announced For Sale, 13 April 2015, https://www.finance.nsw.gov.au/about-us/media-releases/millers-point-properties-announced-sale (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[8] Lisa Allen, The Australian Business Review website, Provectus Care’s Shane Moran pays $7.7m for Dawes Point mansion, 3 September 2016, https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/property/provectus-cares-shane-moran-pays-77m-for-dawes-point-mansion/news-story/9fa7af25fae87916f368f02c3829690e (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[9] There were donations made by an elder brother and possibly other relatives of Shane Moran – and possibly Shane Moran himself – to the NSW Liberal Party in the five month period after he first publicly announced in September 2016 that he was applying for planning approval to turn the Darling House that he bought as part of the Millers Point privatisations into a high-end aged care facility. Firstly, in two donations made on 5 September 2016 and 25 September 2016, Moran Australia (Residential Aged Care) Pty Ltd run by Shane Moran’s brother, Peter Moran, donated a total of $2,000 to the NSW Liberal Party (http://searchdecs.elections.nsw.gov.au/Documents/FD2017-3968.pdf). Then on 22 November 2016, a further $2,000 was donated by a Shane Moran (http://searchdecs.elections.nsw.gov.au/Details.aspx?EFID=a0S6F00000qI37YUAS&ID1=0019000000twe3RAAQ&RPID=2017H1). However, we are unable to be sure whether this Shane Moran who is listed as “Shane Michael Moran” is the same Shane Moran as the one who bought Darling House given that the address listed with the donation is different to the address of the Swifts mansion that the Shane Moran who bought Darling House is known to live in (although he may well have multiple addresses that he uses). If it is not the same Shane Moran, it could however be a cousin, nephew or uncle. Then on 24 February 2017, one Matthew John Moran donated $5,500 to the NSW Liberal Party in the single biggest donation to the party by an individual that financial year (http://searchdecs.elections.nsw.gov.au/Details.aspx?EFID=a0S6F00000qI37YUAS&ID1=0019000000twe3RAAQ&RPID=2017H1). This may possibly be a donation by a cousin, nephew or uncle of Shane Moran but we can’t be sure. What is striking is that each of these “Moran” entities who made donations to the NSW Liberal Party in late 2016-early 2017 – Moran Australia (Residential Aged Care) Pty Ltd, Shane Michael and Mathew John Moran – made no other donations to the NSW Liberal Party in the last ten years except during this brief period soon after Shane Moran happened to start seeking approval to convert Darling House into a high-end aged care facility. And there were no other donations made by any other person with a Moran surname to the NSW Liberal Party in this ten-year period either. It is, however, possible that the donation made by Shane Moran’s brother’s company, Moran Australia (Residential Aged Care) Pty Ltd, and donations by others who were possibly in the same family/extended family was more about protecting one or more of the several sets of aged care businesses owned by Moran siblings from scrutiny in the light of the emerging scandal in Australia over the quality and price of aged care residences and of elder abuse in aged care homes. Given this uncertainty over the purpose of the donations and uncertainty over the exact identities of all the donors with a Moran surname we chose not to include this material in the main body of the article but detail it here for other activists, researchers and journalists to follow through on in the future.

[10] Morris, Alan (2018). Gentrification and Displacement – The Forced Relocation of Public Housing Tenants in Inner-Sydney, Springer Verlag (Singapore), https://www.booktopia.com.au/gentrification-and-displacement-alan-morris/prod9789811310867.html

[11] Australian Government Productivity Commission (2019). Report on Government Services, Chapter 18 – Housing, Table 18A.3, https://www.pc.gov.au/research/ongoing/report-on-government-services/2019/housing-and-homelessness/housing/rogs-2019-partg-chapter18.pdf

[12] The year 2018 was not included in the comparison because in that year the statistical method used by the NSW government was changed and public housing figures from that year onwards included dwellings identified for disposal or leased to community organisations. Note d in Table 18A.3 in the above reference states that: “PH [Public Housing] and SOMIH [State Owned and Managed Indigenous Housing] data from 2017-18 include dwellings identified for disposal and dwellings leased to a community organisation. These dwellings are excluded from data for previous years ….” This change in statistical method artificially inflated 2018 public housing numbers respective to those in previous years.

[13] Tawar Razaghi, Domain. Annual rental affordability survey finds worst results for low income earners in 10 years, 28 April 2019, https://www.domain.com.au/news/annual-rental-affordability-survey-finds-worst-results-for-low-income-earners-in-10-years-830824/?utm_campaign=strap-masthead&utm_source=smh&utm_medium=link&utm_content=pos5&ref=pos1 (retrieved 29 April 2019)

[14] NSW Government Family and Community Services. Rent and Sales Report – interactive dashboard, https://public.tableau.com/profile/facs.statistics#!/vizhome/Rentandsales/Rent for Cumberland LGA, December 2018 quarter, 1 Bedroom Flat/Unit

[15] NSW Government Family and Community Services. Social Housing Eligibility and Allocations Policy Supplement, Table 1: Household member types and current weekly income allowance, https://www.facs.nsw.gov.au/housing/policies/social-housing-eligibility-allocations-policy-supplement/chapters/income (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[16] Shelter NSW, NSW HOUSING FACT SHEET 1, Dwellings, households & tenure profile (see page 8 in particular), April 2018, https://shelternsw.org.au/sites/shelternsw.org.au/files/public/documents/Shelter%20NSW%20Housing%20Fact%20Sheet%20April%202018.pdf (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[17] Stella Qiu and Ryan Woo, Reuters. China’s Shenzhen to cap new private homes at 40 percent of supply, 5 June 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-property-shenzhen/chinas-shenzhen-to-cap-new-private-homes-at-40-percent-of-supply-idUSKCN1J11E3 (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[18] Elizabeth Winkelman (translated Amber Yang), Australia China Business Circle, China’s Xiongan New Area to Receive 2 trillion yuan ($385 billion) Investment over the next 15 years, http://www.business-circle.com.au/en/?p=3545 (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[19] Xinhua, Beijing reports slowest mortgage growth in 5 yrs, 28 July 2019, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-07/28/c_137354304.htm (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[20] China Daily, Work begins on Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Village, 29 December 2017, http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201712/29/WS5a4636eca31008cf16da44c2.html (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[21] Uma Patel, ABC News, Sam Dastyari steps down from Labor frontbench after accepting money from Chinese donors, 8 September 2016, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-07/sam-dastyari-steps-down-from-labors-front-bench/7823970 (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[22] Australian Electoral Commission website, Summary of Donations reported by Donors – By Party – 2017-18, Registered Party, Liberal Party of Australia, https://periodicdisclosures.aec.gov.au/SummaryDonor.aspx (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[23] Australian Electoral Commission website, Summary of Donations reported by Donors – By Party – 2017-18, Registered Party, Australian Labor Party (ALP), https://periodicdisclosures.aec.gov.au/SummaryDonor.aspx (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[24] Trotskyist Platform website, JAMES PACKER’S CROWN VERSUS MILLERS POINT PUBLIC HOUSING, 18 November 2016, https://www.trotskyistplatform.com/james-packers-crown-versus-millers-point-public-housing/ (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[25] Josephine Tovey, The Sydney Morning Herald website, Residents stick to their point of community, 26 October 2012, https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/residents-stick-to-their-point-of-community-20121025-288bh.html (retrieved 25 April 2019)

[26] ALP website, AFFORDABLE HOUSING FOR RENTERS, https://www.alp.org.au/media/1506/181216_affordable_housing_for_renters_fact_sheet.pdf (retrieved 25 April 2019)

Public Housing, Uncategorized, Unions, Women

Let’s Build More Staunch Actions to Prevent the Privatisation of Public Housing

March 18, 2018

Trade Unionists and Other Supporters of Public Housing Occupy Millers Point
Houses Slated For Privatisation

Let’s Build Towards More Staunch Actions to Demand That Vacant Public Housing Goes to People on the Waiting List or the Homeless & Not to Ultra-Rich Developers & Speculators

Millers Point, Sydney: Houses in High St occupied by trade unionists, current and former public housing tenants and other supporters of public housing. The powerful August 6, 2017 occupation demanded that these vacant public housing dwellings be made available to those on the public housing waiting list or the homeless.

8 March 2018: On August 6 last year, scores of trade unionists, current and former public housing tenants and other supporters of public housing carried out a powerful occupation of vacant public housing dwellings at 78 to 80 High St, Millers Point. These houses in Sydney city are slated for sell-off to wealthy speculators, landlords and capitalist developers. The NSW Liberal/National government had driven off the public housing tenants who lived in the houses. Notably, 78 High St was the home from where housing authorities had, weeks before, forcibly relocated a highly respected female Aboriginal activist and elder. Indeed, a large proportion of the public housing tenants that the right-wing NSW government and high-handed bureaucrats squeezed out of their homes in the Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point area are elderly, single women.

Fittingly, the houses that were occupied have a development notice from a state government authority announcing a plan to build a four car, car-park under them. The project would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet, the state government had previously said that it did not have money to maintain the homes and gave this as a primary reason for needing to sell them! But now that public housing tenants have been kicked out they are prepared to spend large sums of money to make the homes more valuable for their rich developer mates and other wealthy property investors expected to buy them.

The occupation demanded that the occupied houses and all unoccupied public housing dwellings in the area be given to the homeless or those on public housing waiting lists. Activists adorned the occupied homes with banners emphasising the struggle against the sell-off of public housing as well as the always colourful array of union flags. The action caught the housing authorities and their security guards by surprise. The NSW government went into a panic that the action would resonate.

The August 6 mobilisation was backed by the Sydney Branch of the MUA as well as by the CFMEU. The occupation was a rear-guard action to stop the sell-off of public housing in the Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point area. Sadly, all but a handful of public housing tenants who once lived in the area have now been squeezed out as part of the state government’s plan to sell off nearly all the public housing in the area. However, this struggle was more than about the crucial fight to save the working class community in Millers Point. It was also about the broader struggle to stop the sell-off of public housing right across the country. This struggle is urgent. In just 12 years, the former ALP and current Liberal state governments have slashed NSW’s public housing stock by 12%. The proportion of people with access to public housing in the whole country is nearly 30% less than what it was 23 years ago.

Later in the evening of the August 6 occupation, after numbers had dwindled somewhat, a heavy contingent of riot cops raided the occupation site. They arrested four activists participating in the struggle who had linked arms to protect the public property from theft by the ultra-rich. The last of those arrested was evicted Millers Point public housing tenant, Peter Muller, who has been at the forefront of resisting the state government’s atrocious sell-off of public housing in the area over the last three and a half years. The others arrested were a staunch anti-fascist activist who has been involved in the struggle to defend public housing in the area from the very start, a young university student and a Trotskyist Platform supporter.

The four arrested have been charged with “Hinder/Resist police officer in execution of duty” and are currently going through court proceedings. Police used heavy-handed force during the arrests. In two of the cases, the arrested were subjected to undue pain by the police. In one case, police caused permanent damage to the person’s wrist. In another case, police, after they took one of the arrested around the corner and out of sight of most other protesters, bent his wrist back to cause sharp pain and then maintained a painful hold for a few minutes. This was even though he was in no way resisting arrest at the time. This was witnessed by another of the arrested who was already in the paddy wagon at the time (but with the back door open). In addition to the four arrested and facing criminal charges, in the hours leading up to the action, three other supporters of public housing were given trespass fines for allegedly being in the occupied houses.

However, far from this repression deterring people, the occupation has inspired many supporters of public housing to be more determined than ever. In the days following the August 6 occupation, many who participated in or heard of the struggle were eager to know when the next action would be! What is driving the movement is the extreme lack of affordable rental housing caused by the privatisation of public housing by successive governments. This is pushing large numbers of people into poverty — and many even into homelessness. The campaign for public housing concerns all working class people and all the poor since the dire shortage of public housing is allowing landlords to jack up rents to exorbitant levels in the private rental market. Therefore, it is inevitable that those standing for the interests of working class people will launch other staunch actions in support of public housing. That could be in the inner-city or in the many other areas where public housing is being sold off.

Furthermore, the morale of the public housing campaign was given a boost when solidarity donations covered the entire fines of the three activists who were hit with civil fines (but not charged) in the period leading up to the occupation. Most of this was collected in a September 1 fundraiser organised to help cover the fines and review the lessons of the occupation struggle. The successful fundraiser was chaired by secretary of the Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point tenants committee, Barney Gardner, and included speeches by the then sole remaining High St public housing tenant, Wendy, by Peter Muller, by Campbelltown based public housing activist, Peter Butler and by two young activists heavily involved in the occupation struggle including Trotskyist Platform comrade, Samuel Kim. Speaking of the August 6 occupation, Peter Muller made a crucial point at the fundraiser: “we may not have been able to achieve our aims but we sure did scare the be-jesus out of the government.” He pointed to announcements from the government about increasing social housing in the days following the occupation as a possible concession to the struggle and to the threat of more similar, militant actions. Moreover, it seems that in the days following the occupation, the housing bureaucrats had been slightly less pig-headed about forcing the then remaining Millers Point tenants into suburbs and properties that they did not want to move into. Indeed, the 24 hour-a-day security guards that they have posted, ever since the occupation, specifically outside the houses occupied on August 6 shows their fear of further militant struggle.

Supporters of public housing take a strong stand during the 6 August 2017 protest action in Millers Point

Valuable Lessons for Future Struggles

The on the streets struggle to defend and extend public housing in the contemporary period began with an important November 2009 protest outside the office of the then Housing minister in the former ALP federal government, Tanya Plibersek. At the time, federal and state governments were orchestrating the sell off of public housing and building much less than they sold off. Now things have gotten even worse.

This sell-off of public housing is not only bad for all working class people, it is often particularly hurting the most discriminated against and disadvantaged sections of the masses including women, Aboriginal people, the elderly, those from people of coloured backgrounds, youth and people with disabilities. The slashing of public housing is especially hurting low-income single mothers. They and their families are already reeling from measures taken by the Howard conservative government and then the Gillard social-democratic government that combined to cruelly throw all sole parents with children over eight off the parenting payment. As if having to deal with socially conservative people that look condescendingly upon them or being insultingly portrayed by talkback shock jocks and “investigative” reporters as undeserving, “welfare mums” is not enough for low income single mothers to have to face! Now the dire shortage of public housing means that many already squeezed, single mothers have to suffer anywhere from ten to twenty years on the waiting list to get public housing … by which time their children are already adults and the money saved on rent from having public housing will no longer allow them to pay for the school excursions, computer fees, music lessons and sports expenses that they excruciatingly couldn’t afford to provide for their children or for all the clothing, medication, travel and entertainment that they weren’t able to purchase while still being, in what should have been, the prime of their and their family’s life. Meanwhile, one of the combined effects of the gutting of the sole parenting payment and the slashing of public housing is to increase domestic violence against women. For these measures mean that low-income women relying financially on a male partner who is abusive are confronted with the unbearable choice of either going out on their own and living an impoverished life without a guaranteed roof over their heads (and over those of their children if they are mothers) or staying with their partner and trying to endure the attacks.

Yet as government sell-offs of public housing deepen and cause more and more misery, our struggle is notably also getting stronger. The Millers Point public housing tenants by their determined struggle have added so much vigour to the overall fight to defend public housing in NSW. The blockade which attempted to stop Peter Muller’s eviction in May 2017 and then the August 6 occupation have taken the movement up to a new, higher level of militancy.

Millers Point, Sydney: Some activists wait outside ready to defend the August 6 occupation of vacant public housing on High St by dozens of supporters of public housing.

This is what we need because the situation is getting more desperate. We need audacious struggles like the August 6 occupation because this is the only sort of method that works. Lobbying ruling class politicians does not work. For they all, in the end, serve the capitalist, big end of town. The Liberals are the most in your face and arrogant about it. But the ALP and ALP/Greens state and federal governments have also sold off public housing left, right and centre. They did this in Minto, in Bonnyrigg, in Claymore and in Glebe.

To strengthen our struggles for the future, activists for public housing need to learn some crucial lessons from the August 6 occupation and from the blockade three months earlier. The most important of them concerns the police and other state enforcement organs. Illusions in these institutions did affect our struggles. During the May blockade against Peter Muller’s eviction, we had less forces overnight than we could have had when the sheriffs and police raided because many people expected that these bodies would follow their own stated procedures and wait for a new warrant to be issued before charging in. At the August 6 occupation, police promised that they would not raid until at least midday the next day. Expectations that they would keep their promise meant that some people who may have been able to stay longer left to come back the next day and others who heard about the struggle thought it would be OK if they waited for the following day to join the action. That weakened our forces. So the most crucial lesson that must be drawn from these struggles is to understand that the cops, sheriffs, courts and other state organs are not impartial bodies but part of a state created, quite specifically, to impose the interests of the filthy rich, capitalist exploiting class on the rest of us. With this understanding, next time we must work harder to ensure that as many people as possible in the movement are not fooled by any promises from the state enforcement bodies and, certainly, do not trust them to follow their own so-called rules.

Secondly, the recent actions also expose many of the mainstream politicians who say they are our allies. They often make nice speeches trying to get our votes. But when we launch the kind of action that can actually scare the enemy, most of them are nowhere to be seen. That is why we must rely only on our own power, united with all the downtrodden. As Trotskyist Platform activist, Samuel Kim, explained while giving his speech at the September 1 fundraiser:

“The enemy have their immense wealth, their cops, sheriffs, courts, politicians and media. But we have the power that comes from the fact that their gigantic profits actually come from our labour; we have our potentially huge numbers, our potential unity, our unions and our determination that was seen in the August 6 occupation.”

Everyone who took part in the August 6 occupation and in preparing it should be proud of themselves. As intermediate steps to the next staunch action, we need to broaden support for the struggle to defend public housing through a series of standard rallies that bring new forces into the movement. We can win such broader support! There are hundreds of thousands of people on public housing waiting lists. There are millions more workers on the minimum wage or other low incomes who need public housing but can’t even get on the waiting list because the criteria is so strict. Also the struggle against the sell-off of public housing is part of the overall struggle of working class people and the poor against the greedy capitalists who want to get even richer at our expense.

9 December 2018, Sydney: Current and evicted public housing tenants, trade unionists, unemployed rights activists and other supporters of public housing marched through the Millers Point and Rocks Area demanding “Stop the Sell-Off of Public Housing.” Standing by the August 6 protest occupation of public housing dwellings at 78-80 High St, the march sought to build support for future staunch actions in defence of public housing.

Let us trust only in our own power and build our unity across racial and national lines! Let us reject any expectations in the institutions of the capitalist big end of town that are only there to enforce their interests! Let us prepare for new militant actions by broadening the campaign for a massive increase in public housing!

Aboriginal Struggle, Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Imperialism, Anti-Racism, Communism, Public Housing, Unions

Free The Refugees & Bring Them Here Now!

November 19, 2017

Above: 3 November 2017 – Delegates to an Australian Services Union delegates conference in WA proudly show their support for the embattled Manus refugees. The growing number of statements of solidarity for refugees from sections of the union movement needs to be turned into protest industrial action. [Photo credit: WA from Unionists for Refugees – WA Facebook page]

Turn Our Union Movement’s Stated Solidarity with Manus Refugees Into Industrial Action That Can Force the Australian Government to: Free The Refugees & Bring Them Here Now!

Enough is enough. End their suffering. Evacuate these men now.
These men are people like us. They deserve to be working people. They are engineers, journalists, artists and former United Nations workers. They are fathers, brothers, uncles and sons.
We have taken their dreams of a better life, and replaced them with an unrelenting nightmare.

ACTU Statement, 10 November 2017

18 November 2017: Refugees on Manus Island are in a desperate struggle. After Australian governments and their henchmen in PNG imprisoned them for years in the island’s hellhole detention camp, Australian and PNG authorities now want them to move to yet another prison in a location where they will be even more unsafe. The refugees have good reason to be fearful. Just seven months ago, navy personnel living on the island attacked them with rocks and knives. The navy staff reportedly even unleashed gunfire against the centre.

So it is completely understandable that some four hundred of the refugees have refused to re-locate. They don’t want to be attacked or even killed. They don’t want another prison! They just want to be free to live like human beings should. The refugees are courageously resisting even after police cut food, water and electricity to the camp. Five days ago, the Australian-puppet PNG authorities once again entered the camp to destroy the water wells and bins that they had used to collect water to drink. These human beings are being starved and forced to live in filthy conditions. They are being tortured!

The Liberal and ALP politicians’ racist savagery against refugees and their fear-mongering against Muslims is emboldening extreme race-hate groups within Australia. A week ago, one such outfit threateningly ambushed Labor senator, Sam Dastyari. The bigots branded Iranian-born Dastyari a “monkey” and a “terrorist” as he sat down for a quiet pub meal. If this is what happens to a well-connected mainstream politician because he doesn’t happen to be white enough for the racist white supremacists, consider the threats that other people of colour face – whether from conscious fascists or from garden variety rednecks. Just two weeks ago, three Chinese high school students were bashed at a bus stop in South Canberra. This was part of a series of racist attacks in the area on the Chinese community.

The fact is that in the capitalist world, fascism is on the rise. Not only did a hard right racist become U.S. president and not only have far-right parties made big electoral gains in Austria, France and Germany but in all these countries as well as in the likes of Sweden, Greece, Ukraine and Russia fascist thugs are terrorising migrants. Far right forces are being emboldened because the more that capitalist rulers prevent working class people from having secure jobs and the more that they slash social services the more they have to scapegoat minority communities for the suffering caused by their own capitalist system of exploitation. Meanwhile the economic insecurity that this so-called system creates is pushing the most backward sections of the middle class into seeking salvation in extreme nationalism. If we do not resist, there is a danger that large parts of the world could end up being ravaged by the horror of Hitler-style fascism. The viciousness of the Australian regime’s treatment of refugees and the concomitant escalation in racist terror on the streets should both serve as warning signs!

Refugees imprisoned on Manus Island bravely protest for freedom and safety and condemn the condemn cruelty of Australian government.

Many people have, indeed, been fighting against the Liberal government’s abuse of Manus refugees. People have held spirited protests and there have been brief occupations of immigration department offices. Some activists have staged audacious media stunts like climbing a crane to hoist the banner “SOS: Evacuate Manus Now!” over Flemington racecourse on Melbourne Cup day. Last Friday, hundreds of us rightly gave a good serve to participants at a Sydney fundraiser for Tony Abbott which also acted as a speaking appointment for the much hated immigration minister, Peter Dutton.

However, what the refugee rights movement is up against was seen by the response of the ruling class to Friday’s protest. Firstly, police aggressively manhandled protesters. Even after we marched off far from the site of the right-wing fundraiser, riot police continued to assault demonstrators. They arrested four protesters – one of whom was charged. Today, another activist was charged, this time over the incident when Abbott’s sister and fellow Liberal party hack, Christine Forster, ran into spirited opposition when she entered Friday’s fundraiser. Meanwhile, mainstream media hysterically condemned the protests and greatly hyped up the trouble that the whingeing sook, Forster, ran into. And it was not just the conservative Murdoch media that was on the charge here. The “liberal” Fairfax media and the ABC joined in too. And the condemnation of our protests from politicians was not restricted to Abbott and his hard line mate, Dutton. Opposition frontbencher, Anthony Albanese, a member of Labor’s so-called “Left” faction, accused us of “intimidation.” This highlights the fact that this is a bi-partisan war on refugees. Indeed, behind the cruel torture of refugees stands the overwhelming majority of the capitalist ruling class as well as their henchmen – from their physical enforcers in the police force to the judges and magistrates providing legal cover for their crimes to their media propagandists and their political servants on both sides of parliament.

Against this overwhelming physical, political, judicial, media and financial power that the bosses wield we need our own power. Actually, we already have it! For our power lies in the organised workers movement and its ability to unleash industrial action to hurt the profits of the rich capitalist businessmen for whose interests the whole state machine has been set up over many years. It is possible to mobilise the working class in defence of refugees because it is in the very interests of the working class to oppose racism since such racism is poison to the workers unity essential to building any campaign for workers rights. Importantly, five days ago, the Australian Council of Trade Unions released a statement calling on “the Australian Government to immediately evacuate people seeking asylum on Manus Island, to end the appalling humanitarian crisis.” This statement now needs to be backed up by industrial action. The workers movement and all its allies must fight to demand that all the Manus and, indeed, Nauru-based refugees be brought here to Australia with the full rights of citizens. Freedom for all people imprisoned in Australia’s hell-hole detention centres from Manus to Nauru to Villawood to Christmas Island! Full rights of citizenship for all refugees, migrants, guest workers and students! Drop the charges against all pro-refugee protesters!

31 October 2017: On the day Manus Island refugees were set to be thrown into a yet more unsafe prison, Manus Island residents organised by the Manus Alliance Against Human Rights Abuse demand freedom for the refugees and their resettlement in Australia.

PNG and Australian Imperialism

The persecution of Manus refugees highlights just how much PNG is under the control of the Australian ruling class. For decades, PNG was an Australian colony. Australia’s rulers treated the PNG masses with the same racist arrogance that they continue to subject Aboriginal people to. After PNG gained independence in 1975, Australian-owned companies continued to loot her mineral wealth without paying much royalty to local people. Today, up to 500 people in the PNG capital are sleeping rough after two Australian-owned developers threw out 2,000 people living in the waterfront Paga Hill shantytown with no resettlement. With the PNG people so badly impoverished by Australian imperialist exploitation, some PNG locals have become resentful of those who, like refugees, are mistakenly seen as competing for scarce goods.

In a classic neo-colonial arrangement, Australian judges, bureaucrats and “advisers” have continued to impregnate PNG’s state organs after the so-called “independence” of PNG was officially declared in 1975. Thus, PNG’s Supreme Court – the same court that last week knocked back an application to restore basic services to the Manus camp – has not one but three Australian judges on its panel! As for the PNG police force, it is advised – i.e. directed – by a contingent of over 70 Australian Federal Police officers stationed directly in PNG. Through a combination of the pressure of these Australian bureaucrats and police officers, through bribery of PNG officials by Australian businessmen and through the economic threats of all-powerful Australian corporations, the capitalist elites living in places like Point Piper, Mosman, Toorak, Vaucluse and Hunters Hill are able to ensure that the PNG state machine serves their interests. In June last year, PNG police opened fire on students protesting against the corrupt, Australian-backed prime minister, Peter O’Neill. Reports indicate that at least four students were shot dead. Earlier from 1989, the PNG military, acting in the interests of Australian-owned miner CRA (which later merged with British RTZ to form Rio Tinto), brutally attacked a brave rebellion by people on the island of Bougainville. The Bougainville people rose up against CRA’s refusal to grant proper compensation – and its arrogant destruction of the surrounding land – from its hugely profitable Panguna copper mine. But, backed up by Australian arms, military advisers and Australian pilots strafing the Bougainville people from helicopter gunships, the PNG military and its Australian godfathers killed over 15,000 Bougainville people through either gunfire or the starvation and lack of medicine that resulted from the blockade that they imposed on the island’s people. Today these same forces are doing a mini-version of that blockade against the Manus refugees – and if they are not stopped the same tragic consequences will ensue!

Meanwhile, Australian governments have pressured PNG authorities to not only privatise PNG public services but even its land held by kinship groups too. This has, obviously, led to greater inequality and a replacement of the local people’s pre-colonial, community-minded outlook with the ruthless rivalries of unrestrained dog eat dog capitalism. Nevertheless, contrary to the Australian media’s attempt to brand all the Manus people as violent attackers of refugees – even as the media, itself, unsympathetically reports on the refugees’ plight – some on the island have been bravely defying the police and trying to pass food through to the refugees in the camp. Furthermore, over three hundred people on the island, organised by Manus Alliance Against Human Rights Abuse, have signed a petition asking for all the asylum seekers to be returned to Australia. Moreover, although in remote and navy-dominated Manus many people do imbibe the Australian government’s hostility to refugees, in urban parts of PNG – especially in the capital with its working class concentration – there have been many instances of brave resistance against the Australian-dictated social order. In 2001, PNG students along with others held mass protests and occupations against privatisation of state assets. Bearing slogans against the Australian government, the IMF and the World Bank that had dictated the privatisation program, they eventually forced the PNG government to back down. This heroic struggle came at great cost – PNG police shot dead four of the anti-privatisation protesters in June 2001.

PNG, June 2001, Left: Students and others courageously protest against the Australian government, IMF and World Bank for dictating a privatisation agenda on PNG. Acting in the interests of their Australian neo-colonial masters, the PNG police responded with fierce repression (Right), shooting dead four protesters. Today, in preventing food, water and medicine getting to the Manus refugees, the PNG police are once again proving to be the henchmen of the brutal Australian imperialist ruling class.

Typical Racist Brutality of the Australian Regime

The horror of what Australia’s rulers are doing to the Manus refugees has driven new layers of well-meaning people into the refugee rights movement. Some of them and others involved in the campaign for a long time have held slogans about the Manus issue like, “This is Un-Australian.” Such sentiments are encouraged by the speeches of Greens politicians at refugee rights rallies who often state that “Australia’s treatment of refugees puts a stain on our proud human rights record.” However, the truth is that the Australian government’s persecution of refugees is all too typical of the “human rights record” of this ruling class. Indeed, the way they are grinding down refugees at the Manus camp right now actually draws attention to the way they have subjected Aboriginal children in the NT and other Australian youth detention centres to unsanitary conditions as well as torture. The death last Christmas Eve of 27 year-old Manus refugee from Sudan, Faysal Ishak Ahmed, after authorities denied him proper medical treatment for his heart and breathing problems has eerie similarities to the August 2014 death of imprisoned 22 year-old Aboriginal woman, Julieka Dhu, who died of a severe bacterial infection after racist WA police murderously refused her medical treatment. And the way that Manus guards and cops bashed to death Kurdish asylum seeker, Reza Berati, in 2014, recalls the brutal bashing to death in Palm Island ten years earlier of the Aboriginal man, Mulrunji Doomadgee, by a racist Queensland cop. Indeed, capitalist rule in this country was founded on the genocidal dispossession of Aboriginal people. Nevertheless, Aboriginal people continue to resist racist state violence, famously during the Redfern resistance actions and Palm Island uprising, both in 2004. The latter brought to prominence the great Aboriginal hero from Palm Island, Lex Wotton. But the killings in and out of state custody of John Pat, Eddie Murray, TJ Hickey, Julieka Dhu, Wayne “Fella” Morrison, David Dungay, Tane Chatfield and hundreds of other people show that Aboriginal people continue to be murdered by racist Australian police and prison guards to this very day.

So the cruel mandatory detention of refugees does not come out of the blue. Indeed, it is an extension of the Australian White Australia Policy that lasted officially up to the mid-1970s. That policy effectively barred most non-white people from entering the country. Even the impunity that detention centre guards have for extreme acts of brutality against refugees is rooted in Australia’s past and present. We only have to note that not a single Australian prison guard or cop has ever been convicted over the death of an Aboriginal person in custody. Or to point to the way that the racist redneck who chased down and ran over 14 year-old Aboriginal youth, Elijah Doughty, in Kalgoorlie was only given a very light sentence for his deadly actions. Meanwhile, the spin of the Australian authorities and media over their atrocities on Manus is all too typical as well. It is like the way they black out the voice of Aboriginal people speaking out against murders of their family and friends in custody or the way they tried to cover up the racist character of the wave of violent attacks on Indian students in Australia in 2009.

The fact is that the filthy rich businessmen who run this country – and their henchmen in the state machine – will do whatever it takes to strengthen their rule and boost their profits. Today, as homelessness is on the rise, Australian governments drive more people into poverty by selling off low-rent public housing. They are also persecuting trade union activists in the construction industry. Indeed, their cruel repression of refugees is an indication of what they will seek to impose on the exploited working class should we mount a serious challenge to their rule. This is no joke, comrades.

Identifying the cruel oppression of refugees as one of the aspects of a profoundly unjust social order opens the door to a united front with Aboriginal people fighting against savage oppression, trade unions struggling against anti-union laws and cuts to working conditions, low income people suffering through the dire shortage of low-rent accommodation as well as ever more stringent restrictions on access to social welfare and the many communities in Australia who bear the full brunt of Islamophobia and other variants of the white supremacist, racist agenda.

The Burning Question:
What Strategy to Free the Refugees?

Over the last 25 years many people have sincerely put great effort into the struggle for refugee rights. But at this critical moment we must consider: is the movement basing itself on a strategy and program that can actually win? Well, certainly, the hard work of thousands of activists over the years has not gone to waste. As a result of all the protests for refugee rights many, many more people are aware of the issue and have become sympathetic to the plight of refugees. However, the movement has not been able to make Australian governments retreat from any of their cruel policies. When one considers how many hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in this country are sympathetic to the plight of refugees then one has to conclude that the strategy the refugee rights movement has pursued up till now has been a wrong one.

So what strategy has the movement been based on? It is true that people from diverse political backgrounds participating in the actions have different ideas about how best to achieve freedom for refugees. However, the prevailing strategy, which reflects the politics of the socialist group, Solidarity, that has control of the Refugee Action Coalition (RAC) is one that’s based on the idea of change through parliament. So, the movement, even while criticising the ALP’s refugee policies, campaigns for the ALP and Greens to be elected to parliament and seeks to pressure the ALP to reverse its anti-refugee policy. Thus, the formation of a future ALP government with a pro-refugee policy or an ALP-Greens coalition is put forward as a means to free the refugees.

The problem with this strategy, however, is that it has not worked. Indeed, it was the Rudd Labor government which in July 2013 brought in the current “PNG solution.” Labor’s Rudd made John Howard’s racist refugee policy even more xenophobic by declaring that, “From now on, any asylum seeker who arrives in Australia by boat will have no chance of being settled in Australia as refugees.” And let’s not forget it was the Keating ALP government that in 1992 introduced the policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers in the first place.

Unlike the ALP, the Greens have spoken out – sometimes strongly – against the Turnbull government’s brutal war on refugees. However, in 2010 they jumped into a de facto coalition with the Gillard ALP government without demanding even the slightest commitment from that government to ease its war on refugees. During the period of the Greens-ALP alliance government from August 2010 to February 2013, not only did the Greens prop up a government that was maintaining mandatory detention of refugees but that government also significantly intensified its anti-refugee policy. In August 2012, the Gillard government announced that it would resume the detention of refugees in Manus and Nauru that had been paused during the first Rudd government. Even though the Greens opposed the move, they still remained part of the de facto coalition government! That’s hardly a serious commitment to refugee rights!

The reason that all pro-capitalist parties are complicit in the oppression of refugees is that the vast majority of the capitalist bigwigs – whom all these current parliamentary parties ultimately serve – are committed to the war on refugees. To be sure, some in the capitalist class do worry that the brutality of their anti-refugee policies will damage the Australian state’s reputation in the world and thus impede their ability to use the claim of standing for “human rights” to justify their predatory imperialist interventions abroad. However, a bigger section of the corporate tycoons calculate that they need the diversionary and divisive effect of a harsh policy against refugees. And from their ruthlessly greedy point of view they are probably right! Without their governments making the masses think that refugees and migrants are some kind of threat to their wellbeing, how else are they going to make working class people wear the fact that workers’ real wages aren’t rising and workers’ penalty rates are being cut while the capitalists’ own fat profits are ballooning ever higher? How else are the big shareholders and executives of the NAB bank going to stop their own workforce from revolting at the fact that they are throwing 6,000 of these workers out of their jobs even after making a spectacular $5.3 billion annual profit?

Given that the Greens do claim to stand for refugee rights it is not wrong per se for RAC to invite them to speak at their rallies. Nor, given that the pro-capitalist ALP does have a working class base (unlike the openly pro-boss Liberals), is it unacceptable to have speakers from Labor for Refugees in order to encourage pro-refugee individuals within the ALP to take a more outspoken stand. However, what is harmful is for the Solidarity group leadership of RAC to then promote future ALP or ALP-Greens “lesser evil” governments as a means of salvation for refugees.

The left-social democratic Solidarity group’s parliamentarist strategy was especially evident during the federal elections last year when they openly handed out election material for the Greens and called to put the ALP second after the Greens. When pushing these parliamentary illusions, Solidarity are acting to dampen support for the truly militant actions that are needed to win refugee rights even while young Solidarity members, themselves, passionately promote and participate in staunch pro-refugee actions.

Of course, if the refugee rights movement could be re-directed into one that could start to threaten and harm the ruling class’ interests – in particular, their profits – then a section of the capitalist class would be forced to consider backing down. Their more “left” and small-l liberal representatives would then start seriously working towards an overhaul of refugee policy. But this would not be change driven by these pro-capitalist parliamentary parties themselves but, rather, a case of the resistance of the masses forcing a section of the capitalists and the parties that serve them to retreat. That is a huge difference!

What a Working Class Orientation Really Means

To be able to threaten the interests of the ruling class means unleashing the industrial muscle of the union movement. Encouragingly, contingents of unionists from the Nurses and Midwives Association, the MUA, NTEU, Teachers Federation and other unions have taken part in pro-refugee actions. RAC does make efforts to lobby unions to participate in the movement. And the Solidarity group does state that a working class orientation is needed. However, a working class orientation requires more than just motivating unions to support the refugee rights campaign. It means setting the line of the movement itself to a pro-working class direction. In particular, it means making open appeals to workers’ interests, not just in statements given out especially to unionists, but in the actual, official callouts for the entire action itself. That means, for example, featuring as headline slogans in the main action call outs, calls similar to, “Workers: Let’s Build the Unity We Need to Stand Up to the Greedy Bosses – Oppose Racism by Standing with Refugees!” Openly appealing to workers’ class interests in the action callouts is what could win broader layers of unionists to see the refugee struggle as their struggle. It is what will help more conscious union activists who are already involved in the movement to mobilise their co-workers to join in as well.

This could, of course, put off some liberal refugee rights supporters who may be anti-union or unwilling to align with an openly pro-working class movement – people like liberal small business bosses, mid-level managers and managerial level public service bureaucrats who may support the Greens. It is this prospect of a break with such small-l liberals that, no doubt, makes Solidarity – and the other groups prominent in directing RAC like Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance – baulk from setting the refugee rights movement on an openly pro-working class direction. But this choice must be made. One cannot effectively appeal to both the rival classes in this society. If one truly believes in a pro-working class orientation – and it is clear that it will take the mobilisation of the working class and its allies to repulse the war on refugees – one has to be prepared to break with pro-capitalist elements. We should add that given that there have been many militant pro-refugee actions over the last two weeks and given the depth of the media/politician witch hunt over the Christine Forster “incident,” those left social democratic groups who have been so careful not to scare off small-l liberal elements may find these types quietly retreating from the movement anyhow or otherwise distancing themselves from militant protests.

Of course, whether the workers movement can be mobilised in defence of refugees depends on not only the direction of the refugee rights movement but on the internal politics of the union movement itself. Currently, the anti-refugee ALP politically dominates the union movement. That’s why challenging this influence of the ALP is key to mobilising the workers movement in defence of refugees.

We need to purge from the union movement not only loyalty to the ALP but something that runs even deeper – support for Labor’s outlook. Unfortunately, most workers currently back the ALP’s economic nationalist agenda. ALP slogans like “Employ Australians First,” by setting up local citizens as job market rivals of foreigners, inevitably creates resentment towards guest workers, refugees and international students. Indeed, protectionism runs so deep that much of the Far Left acquiesces to it even while trying to present it in a “clean” way devoid of open racism. The Socialist Alliance group, Socialist Alternative and the Communist Party of Australia all backed Australia’s largest demonstration to keep out foreign workers: the July 2012 “Local Workers First” rally in Perth. Here we must, however, give credit where credit is due to the Solidarity group. Although, overall, of all the far-left groups, Solidarity panders most to the ALP and Greens, they do take a strong stand against economic nationalism.

Trotskyist Platform is on a campaign to oppose all forms of economic nationalism. We understand that as long as this nationalism remains dominant in the union movement, efforts to mobilise the working class masses in defence of refugees will be greatly undermined. We seek to prove to workers how economic nationalism in all its forms undermines the unity and focus we need to fight for workers rights.

We can only defeat economic nationalist slogans if we provide an alternative program for secure jobs for all workers. Such a program is one of militant class struggle to prevent capitalist bosses from retrenching workers and forcing them to increase hiring at the expense of their fat profits. When the greedy capitalists scream that this will cause their economy to collapse, the workers movement must respond: if you big business owners cannot run the economy in a way that guarantees secure jobs for all workers then we working class people will take the economy out of your hands and place it in our own strong, able and collective hands. A true revolution that brings the working class into economic and state power is, ultimately, what we need. It will ensure secure jobs for all, truly free medical care, education and public housing and, by removing the rule of the exploiting class, it will liquidate the main driver of racist policies. Like the workers state created by the Russian Revolution 100 years ago declared, in its very first constitution, a workers state today would grant asylum to all refugees and give the rights of citizenship to all working class people residing on its soil. Crucially, the overturn of capitalist rule would save us from the real threat that we face, today, of a future triumph of the fascist, hard right form of capitalism.

Yet we do need to do far more than simply proclaim the need for socialist revolution. There are many struggles that we need to engage in right now. A workers revolution can only be built by first uniting the working class and training it to trust only in its own power when that mighty proletarian power is itself united with the power of all other oppressed groups.

History has entrusted our class – the working class – to bring justice to society. We need to mobilise the workers movement in defence of refugees, against racist state terror and as a force that can shut down far-right racist terror groups right in their tracks. The working class must unite across ethnic and national lines in a struggle against racism precisely because we need to train the working class to be the champion of all of the oppressed. So let’s be guided by this perspective during our participation in the campaign for the Manus refugees. Let’s oppose illusions in salvation through the ALP and Greens within the refugee rights movement! Let’s fight to ensure that refugee rights actions are built on openly pro-working class slogans! Let’s struggle to root out economic nationalism in all its forms from our unions! We must intensify the agitation to mobilise working class action in defence of the Manus refugees!

Anti-Capitalism, Public Housing, Unions

NSW Government Resorts to Gestapo-like Tactics, Smashing Windows to Evict a Public Housing Tenant at 6:20am – The Fight Against Privatisation Continues

August 5, 2017

Linked arms at 23 high street defying sheriff — 9 May 2017: Trade unionists and other supporters of public housing carried out a powerful blockade that initially thwarted an eviction at 32 High St, Millers Point.

TP Placard that reads " Stop the privatisation of public housing! Stop the attacks on services working class people need". — Trotskyist Platform Placard that reads ” Stop the privatisation of public housing! Stop the attacks on services working class people need”.

ETU (Electrical Trade Union) on the side of the need for more public housing for the working class. With a placard in the background that reads "Social Cleansing Evictions, Millers Pt". — ETU (Electrical Trade Union) on the side of the need for more public housing for the working class. With a placard in the background that reads “Social Cleansing Evictions, Millers Pt”.

Picture of public housing protest occupation in defiance of the capitalist sheriff.

The following leaflet advocating a militant, class struggle strategy to stop the sell-off of public housing has been distributed at actions for public housing, trade union rallies and in working class suburbs. By March 2018, nearly all the remaining public housing tenants in the Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point area have now been driven out of their homes. However, through determined action it can still be possible to save many of the homes in the area for public housing before they are all sold off to wealthy developers and speculators and re-occupied.

NSW Government resorts to Gestapo-like Tactics, Smashing Windows to Evict a Public Housing Tenant but the Powerful Union-led Struggle Against Social “Cleansing” in Sydney City is Far from *Over***

Continue the Fight to Prevent the Sell-Off of Public Housing in Millers Point & Sirius

Stop the Privatisation of Public Housing throughout Australia

27 July 2017: On 10 May 2017 around ten to fifteen sheriffs, police and high-level bureaucrats raided a terrace house at 32 High Street, Millers Point. They invaded the inner Sydney home through the back entrance and then crashed their way into the dwelling after smashing through a window. So, what was the target that required such huge “enforcement” resources? Was it a raid on one of the many filthy, rich business owners who illegally dodge tax, bribe government officials or otherwise break their own system’s rules? Not a chance! This raid was perpetrated in order to evict a hard-working, working-class, public housing tenant from his residence so that the dwelling could be sold off to some, clearly, very rich person.

At the time of the 6:20am raid, the tenant, electrician Peter Muller, had already left for his 5am shift at work. However, the Gestapo-style raid saw authorities threaten with arrest several of his supporters who had courageously stayed in the dwelling to protect him. The invading authorities threw out Peter’s supporters, ransacked the place and impounded Peter’s property. They changed the locks and bolted up windows so zealously that, to this date, they have been able to enforce this eviction.

For over three years, the NSW Liberal state government has been putting massive pressure on public housing tenants in the Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point area to leave their community so that their homes could be sold off to wealthy buyers – often developers or property speculators. Among those recently forced to move is an Aboriginal sovereign woman who had waited decades to get public housing in the area and is now being booted off the land that her people belong to. Meanwhile, a large number of those people forced to leave are now distraught – and even suicidal – at having to split up from a close knit, working class community. As Peter Muller aptly put it to his supporters when speaking of the NSW government: “I feel that there’s something going wrong that you can actually socially cleanse an entire class of working people just to sell it for cash to their developer mates.” And so that no one gets diverted by the false bogey about foreign investors being to blame, it is important to stress that all the buyers of sold-off public housing are rich local Australians as foreigners are banned from purchasing existing homes in Australia.

Public housing in the area originally housed maritime workers who worked in the nearby docks. Many of the tenants who are being forced out are descendants of these workers. Over 110 years ago, public housing in the area was fought for and won in a determined struggle by unions for decent, affordable housing close to their work opportunities. Although, since the 1960s, state authorities have tried to drive out working class tenants from the area, action by the Builders Labourers Federation trade union and other unions in the 1970s thwarted their plans. However, the big end of town have continued to be relentless in their drive to socially “cleanse” the city of working class people.

Nevertheless, when Peter Muller was given a notice to be evicted, the hard core of remaining tenants in the area said: enough is enough. They said they will tolerate no more evictions. These remaining public housing tenants in the area – as well as ex-tenants who have already been forced out – and their many supporters drew a line in the sand by resisting the eviction at 32 High Street. With their enthusiastic backing, Peter Muller, a proud Electrical Trades Union (ETU) member and activist in support of public housing, refused to leave his Millers Point residence after being ordered to leave his home. On May 9, on the day the sheriff was to evict him, a powerful action by up to 100 trade unionists, current and former Millers Point tenants and other supporters of public housing blocked the sheriff from evicting Peter. Trade union contingents from the Maritime Union of Australia, CFMEU construction workers union and ETU provided crucial social power and collectivist working class organisation to the action. Participants in the mobilisation openly performed arms-linked, picket line drills to practice resisting the expected incursion by the sheriff. In the face of this mass action, the sheriff first postponed his eviction “appointment” and then cancelled it.

By resisting his own eviction, Peter Muller with the remaining public housing tenants in the area and their many supporters were landing a blow for the struggle to reverse the social “cleansing” of working class people from the city. Together, we were also advancing the wider fight to stop the privatisation of public housing that is taking place throughout Australia. That is why among those participating in that day’s mobilisation were public housing tenants from several other areas including a contingent from Waterloo and individuals from Surry Hills to as far away as Villawood. In response to the May 9 mobilisation, the ruling class authorities and their media attempted to discredit and isolate the struggle by, disgustingly, attacking Peter Muller personally. Both a statement released by the NSW Department of Family and Community Services (FACS) and a government spokesman claimed that Peter was not eligible for public housing because he was working and had some land in country NSW. The sole purpose of this deliberately misleading government spin is to mask the issue at stake: that public housing meant for working class people was being sold off to wealthy developers, speculators and landlords. Furthermore, as Barney Gardner, the leader of the area’s public housing group pointed out, the part share in a property that Peter has is “just a block of dirt in the bush” with no electricity or running water. Peter could not live there because it is hundreds of kilometres from his work in Sydney. The only dwelling there is a tin shed. They want Peter to live in a rough shed hundreds and hundreds of kilometres from his workplace! As for the fact that Peter is now working, when public housing tenants find work that pushes them above the threshold for initial entry into the waiting list, they are normally allowed to remain in their dwelling but then pay a higher rent. Indeed, a significant proportion of public housing tenants relocated into other public housing dwellings are people in this category. After all, a major part of the stated aim of public housing is precisely to give low-income people the stability and security of affordable housing that would make it easier for them to obtain a job that could lift their incomes – not to punish those low-wealth people lucky enough to find work. In this case, however, because the state authorities are so determined to drive out public housing tenants from Millers Point, they have used Peter’s employment as a pretext to kick him out of public housing … and into homelessness! What makes this all the more despicable is that Peter’s job working as an electrician through a labour hire firm does not give him a steady or regular flow of work at all. He is, thus, a low- income worker whose livelihood is precarious and uncertain. And now he has been made homeless as well!

For the state government and top bureaucrats to question Peter Muller’s eligibility for public housing is the very height of cynicism. After all, they are not booting him out of his home to give it to another public housing tenant. They are doing it so they can sell the house to a rich developer or speculator or landlord! Yet, by masking their true agenda and by portraying the struggle against the 32 High St eviction as one counterposed to the interests of those on public housing waiting lists, the NSW authorities felt they could get away with the following morning’s Gestapo-style raid.

The deceit and aggression that the NSW government and state authorities unleashed against Peter Muller and his supporters is what they have also used, in different forms, to drive out many other public housing tenants in the area. However, with the remaining ten to fifteen dwellings where public housing tenants remain, NSW authorities will not be able to muddy the waters by deviously claiming a technicality to justify evicting tenants as they did with Peter. The remaining tenants are pensioners – mostly single women in their 60s, 70s, 80s and in one case 90s. The authorities have accepted that they are all fully eligible public housing tenants and have “offered” them “alternate” public housing accommodation outside the area. However, these tenants are reluctant to move because they don’t want to see the end of the friendly, working class community that they have been part of building and don’t want to be forced out of the area – which many of them have lived in for decades – just for the sake of the rich. Furthermore, several of the people have serious illnesses and used to rely on support networks in the area to provide them with care and companionship. Most of all, they are reluctant to move into public housing dwellings that could have been given to people on the waiting list when they could, instead, remain in their own public housing residences rather than seeing these houses sold off to rich developers and speculators.

Yet the remaining public housing tenants have been put under intense pressure. In some cases, bullying bureaucrats have been deliberately rude and overbearing towards elderly tenants. In the Sirius Building, where two brave elderly single women remain, the authorities have placed security guards in the building to ramp up the pressure on them. Although the stated rationale for this measure is to protect the tenants, the guards are really there to restrict solidarity visits and actions in support of the tenants and to further isolate them. Thus, the guards have stopped and questioned friends of the tenants when they walked into the building with the tenant. In at least one case, they even demanded to inspect what one tenant brought home from a shopping trip! As one of the tenants put it, she feels like she is being imprisoned. Meanwhile, the housing bureaucrats continue to use their favourite trick: refusing or delaying repairs in order to make life so miserable for the tenants that they acquiesce to leaving. Recently after a fault caused hot water to be cut off in the Sirius Building, the authorities waited 13 days to fix the simple problem. In fact, the authorities here have shown the same contempt for public housing tenants and the same reluctance to listen to their concerns as the governments, councils and Grenfell Tower management did leading up to the unspeakable tragedy of London’s horrific Grenfell Tower fire.

Under immense pressure, some of the remaining elderly tenants in the area, aware of their own age and physical illnesses – and facing severe loneliness with most of their neighbours having already been pushed out – have very reluctantly accepted being relocated. The bureaucrats are putting pressure upon many of these tenants to wear being “relocated” to places quite far from their current locations. The government has never honoured the promise that they made, when they first announced that they were considering the complete sell-off of public housing in the area in late 2012, that “residents would be moved within the city.” (http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/residents-stick-to-their-point-of-community- 20121025-288bh.html) Many of these tenants are also battling to ensure that the new places that they are relocated to are suitable. But even here the cruelty of the authorities does not stop. They have in several cases dismissed the health needs of often physically fragile tenants – like the need for dwellings without many stairs in their entrances – when pushing them to accept particular relocations. Meanwhile, the tribunals hearing disputes between the tenants and the authorities have, like the rest of the courts in Australia, proven themselves to be rich people’s courts that are hostile to the needs of working class tenants.

Even as the number of remaining public housing tenants in the Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point area dwindles, the struggle to stop the sell off of public housing there is far, far from over. For many of the vacated dwellings have still not been sold off and still less been occupied. This means there is still time – albeit not very much – to intensify the struggle and, thereby, stop and, indeed, reverse the sell-offs. Crucially, more and more trade unionists, leftists and other supporters of public housing are becoming energised around the campaign. They have seen, too, how powerful the blockade was that kept the sheriff at bay on the first day of the struggle at 32 High St. The core group of people that were involved in that struggle are now more determined than ever. If key lessons from the defeat of that battle are drawn, the coming struggles can be much more effective.

Sell-off of Millers Point and Sirius Is Part of the Ruling Class Agenda to Privatise Public Housing

The NSW state government is lying through their teeth when they say that they are selling off public housing in the inner city to fund public housing elsewhere. We know this because they are actually selling off public housing across the state – left, right and centre! Even if the government’s claims were actually true, which they are definitely not, the whole rationale behind their sell-off agenda is anti-working class. Why should public housing have to be self-financed? Why should any new provision of public housing have to come from the sell- off of public housing elsewhere? Like public hospitals, public schools, childcare, TAFE and universities, public housing is a necessity for working class people and for all of society that ought to be provided as a right. Consider how bogus a government would sound if it claimed that in order to build badly needed new public hospitals in Western Sydney it said it had to sell off to private operators the crucial public hospitals in inner city Sydney – like RPA and St Vincents!

The moves towards “self-financing” of public housing are, indeed, part of the ruling class drive to make basic services – including healthcare and education – increasingly “user pays.” Jacking up TAFE and university fees is part of this agenda. According to the “values” of the capitalist rulers, all the services that working class people need ought to be “user pays” but all the budget items that they, the capitalists, need to keep themselves in power should come out of general revenue from taxes. Thus, none of the pro-capitalist political parties call for the massive government outlays for the organs of anti-working class repression – the police, courts, prisons and military – to be self-financed. Meanwhile, the huge and ever- increasing budget which the ruling class gives to ASIO to spy on us is certainly not “self-financed” by the spies themselves. And neither is their ABCC body which was created to attack our unions in the construction industry.

The spin that the Liberal state government is weaving for Millers Point and Sirius Building tenants – that the government needs to forcibly relocate them from their homes to finance public housing elsewhere – they are also spinning to public housing tenants elsewhere when they sell-off their homes too! For example, this is what they have been telling public housing residents in the Bulli-Woonona-Bellambi area north of Wollongong. Yet no one has seen the additional public housing dwellings because they simply don’t exist! The fact is that from Minto to Claymore to Bonyrigg to Glebe to the Illawara, Millers Point and Waterloo, state and federal governments of all stripes have overseen the slashing of public housing stock. Even a Senate inquiry admitted that from 2006 to 2013, even as the population grew, governments cut the number of public housing dwellings in Australia by 13,000. It is notable that this erosion in public housing has occurred during a period that spans the Howard Liberal government, two Rudd ALP governments, a Gillard-led ALP/Greens de-facto coalition government and the present conservative government. All the current parliamentary parties have been guilty of undermining public housing.

NSW governments have been among the worst in terms of selling off public housing. Official government figures show that in the twelve years up until June 2015 (the latest period that figures have been published for), state governments in NSW have slashed the amount of public housing by 12% (Shelter NSW, NSW housing: a factsheet, updated November 2016, https://shelternsw.org.au/sites/shelternsw.org.au/files/public/documents/fly1610factsheet- nsw_shelternsw5a.pdf). This is even as the state’s population has grown by 15% in the same period. In other words, in a 12 year period, NSW governments – both the previous ALP government up to March 2011 and the Liberal-National coalition since then – have slashed the number of public housing dwellings per resident by almost a quarter. No wonder homelessness is on the rise!

According to the NSW government’s own official figures, in just a 12 year period, first the ALP and then the Liberal state governments sold off 12% of the public housing in NSW. This is even at a time when the population has grown.

It is important to note that this government slashing of the amount of public housing in NSW has continued even after the conservative regime first mooted the complete privatisation of public housing in Millers Point in 2012 and even after they began the forced relocations and sell-offs in 2014. In other words, their claim that this is all about financing additional public housing construction elsewhere is just one big fat lie. Indeed, if anything, the reduction in public housing across Sydney seems to be accelerating. A report in the The Sydney Morning Herald (24 April 2016), titled, “The great public housing fire sale continues despite worsening affordability crisis” reveals that in the first three and a half months of last year alone, over $54 million in public housing was sold off to private buyers – even if one excludes the sell-offs in Millers Point and Glebe! And this sell-off is not just in the inner city. The main areas that they are selling off public housing in – in addition, of course, to the Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point area – include Parramatta, Hurstville, Greenacre, Panania, Campsie, Fairfield, Wentworthville, Lalor Park and Canley Vale.

Recently, especially with study after study showing that not only is housing too expensive for the masses but that rents in Australia are thoroughly unaffordable, governments have been under pressure to show that they are addressing this housing crisis. Thus, they have started to claim that they are committed to “social housing.” However, here they play a neat trick with words. Social housing refers not only to public housing but also to privately-run, “community housing.” In the latter, both nominally not-for-profit as well as profit-seeking groups administer low-rent housing. However, because these private outfits running “community housing” are meant to either break even or make a profit, they discriminate against the most hard-up tents (since such tenants would pay the lowest rents or would be most in danger of defaulting on payments). For the same reason “community housing” operators are even stingier on repairing premises than public housing bureaucrats and even more ruthlessly evict tenants. Thus, while “community housing” may offer a better deal for tenants than renting in the rest of the private market, it is still a big step backwards for tenants compared to public housing. What governments have been doing, while claiming that they are committed to maintaining a level of “social housing”, is to convert public housing into “community housing.” This is a large stride towards the full privatisation of public housing and is a big step backwards for tenants and all working class people. It is worth noting that the Kensington & Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation that managed London’s destroyed Grenfell Tower and which so callously ignored tenants’ pleas to fix manifest fire and other safety hazards is also a private organisation managing social housing – complete with highly paid managers and consultants. Although, in that case, the housing remained publicly owned, the use of this private “non-profit”, “arms-length management organisation” was designed to both shield the government from criticism for under-funding maintenance and to be a step towards turning the housing into so-called “community housing.” There is little doubt that the move towards turning public housing into “community housing” in London contributed to the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire that killed over 80 tenants.

In January 2016, the NSW Liberal government announced that it would transfer 35% of public housing stock to privately-run “community housing” operators over 10 years. The previous year, in their reply to the NSW government’s budget, the ALP state opposition went even further and called for all public housing to be transferred into privately-run, “community housing”! Running the same agenda, the small amount of extra money that the Turnbull federal government has provided for “affordable housing” in its recent budget will not go into increasing public housing supply. Instead, it will be a handout to “community housing” operators in the form of lower interest loans. What is more, the housing thus provided will largely be out of reach of people on the public housing waiting list. For these “community housing” operators will be able to charge up to 80% of the average rent in the area that a house is in. That means that the workers – including rail, tram and bus drivers, ambulance workers, nurses, cleaners, maintenance workers, electricians, water and sewerage workers, taxi drivers, delivery drivers, office assistants and IT support staff – workers who all keep the Sydney CBD going will be largely priced out of living anywhere near their place of work if they want to access such so-called, “community housing”. Even a family living in working class Auburn and relying on a single full-time worker on the minimum wage would have to pay over half of their after tax income on rent to live in a two bedroom unit if they were able to access one of these new, supposedly “affordable”, “community housing” dwellings.

The sell-off of public housing is part of the broader privatisation of basic services that has been pursued by Liberal, ALP and Greens federal and state governments alike. The result of these privatisations is that resources that could be used to maintain and expand public services are being transferred into the pockets of rich, private businessmen. Take the case of Sydney’s Desalination Plant. Just two years after it first went into service in 2010, the state government sold off the plant through a 50 year lease to a consortium half-owned by Hastings Funds Management. Hastings is 100% owned by Westpac Bank and manages funds for wealthy big-time local investors. It has been involved in many privatisations throughout this country from airports to electricity to the Port of Newcastle. The government’s privatisation deal is so generous to Hastings and their consortium partner that the government pays them well over half a million dollars per day even when the plant is, actually, shutdown! And it so happens that from a few weeks after the rich private investors took over the plant, the desalination plant has, indeed, been shut (because Sydney’s dam levels were high enough to make the plant unnecessary to operate). By the time the 50 year lease is over, the Westpac-owned Fund and their partner will be handed over $10 billion from out of public coffers even if the plant does not see another single day of operation! (see http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-27/ nsw-desalination-plant-deal-costing-customers-$10-billion/4985168). That’s well over four times what the private buyers paid for the lease! After giving away such “charity” to filthy rich private businessmen, the government then has the hide to say that it has no money left for new public housing – unless, of course, they sell off existing public housing stock.

Now, in the latest chapter in its privatisation binge, the NSW Liberal government is seeking to privatise bus services in Sydney’s Inner West and inner South-West. This will result in the cutting of bus drivers’ jobs and conditions, the axing of unprofitable bus routes and the bypassing of maintenance and safety checks. However, bus drivers are fighting back. On May 18, bus drivers unleashed a powerful, 24 hour snap strike in defiance of a ruling by the Industrial Relations Commission. The drivers, members of the Rail, Tram and Bus union, have followed this up with fare free days. No to privatisation of Sydney buses – No to privatisation of public housing!

As the Huge Banner That Hung Over the 32 High St Action Stated: “Massively Increase Public Housing Now”

The struggle to stop the privatisation of public housing in the Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point area is an important part of the fight against the privatisation of public assets and against the sell-off of public housing throughout this country. We actually need a massive increase in public housing. We need it to end homelessness and to house the hundreds of thousands of people on Australian public housing waiting lists. We also need it to house the many more low-paid workers who need low-rent housing but either cannot meet the ridiculously strict waiting list entry criteria or don’t bother to get on the list because waiting times are so outlandishly long. Furthermore, we also need public housing to help the many working class people who rent privately and face unaffordable rents because the shortage of affordable accommodation caused by the dearth of public housing means that private landlords are able to get away with jacking up rents. A substantial increase in public housing will finally pressure landlords in the private market to reduce rents since they will then know that their tenants will have somewhere else to go.

However, the propagandists for the capitalist ruling class say that public housing is outdated. They claim that it is not relevant in today’s world. Yet that argument has a fatal flaw. For in the world’s most populous country, China, the government is actually massively increasing the amount of public housing. This is not only through constructing new public housing. They have also been nationalising existing private housing – the very opposite of what has been happening here. Indeed, so committed has the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) been to public housing that they have provided over 45 million additional public housing dwellings in just the last eight years! As a result, an urban Chinese resident is now some six times more likely to have access to public housing than an urban Australian resident!

One obvious reason why the PRC has been able to so spectacularly increase the provision of public housing for its people is that there is a government commitment there to provide affordable housing to working class people. However, that is not the only reason. The other major factor is that although the ruling bureaucrats in China have since the 1980s allowed a harmful level of private sector capitalists to intrude into their economy, it is still socialistic state-owned enterprises that dominate the economy in the PRC. Thus, a large part of the PRC’s public housing is built by state-owned developers – like the giant China State Construction Engineering Corporation – and is financed by the state-owned banks that thoroughly dominate the PRC’s finance sector. In contrast, here in Australia, many of the resources for public housing ends up in the pockets of private contractors who are hired to perform various stages of the construction and most of the maintenance of public housing. Public funds designated for public housing in Australia produce relatively modest outcomes since so much of every dollar nominally assigned for its construction and maintenance ends up going down the drain into the profitable pockets of wealthy private businessmen.

Just as the expansion of public housing in the PRC is part of the continued dominance of public ownership in China’s economy and part of a concerted state-led drive to lift everyone there out of poverty by 2020, the sell-off of public housing in Australia is part of the ruling class’ ongoing privatisation push and part of their drive to reduce access to services for low- income people. Thus, when we stand up for public housing here, we will also be contributing to a broader struggle to defend the public services that working class people need the most.

Lessons of the Struggle to Keep 32 High St Open for Public Housing

In order to strengthen the upcoming struggles we must learn the hard earned lessons of the fight to stop the forced eviction at 32 High St, Millers Point. Chief among these is to understand the role of the state enforcement organs. After the first day’s success in deterring the sheriff ’s planned eviction of the tenant, the Millers Point community received legal advice that the original eviction notice had been cancelled and that it would take some time before a new eviction order could be processed. Thus, many tenants and supporters felt confident that there would not be a new attempt at eviction for at least a couple of days. This confidence was, in part, generated by our strong victory on the first day but also by an expectation that the state authorities would follow their own bureaucratic procedures and rules. Of course, no one totally ruled out a surprise raid overnight which is why some people stayed in the dwelling and were given the necessary phone tree contacts. However, the belief that a raid was unlikely meant that considerably less forces were mobilised to defend the house overnight than was possible.

Next time, the movement must ensure that there are enough forces to protect the public housing dwelling being targeted for eviction 24/7 regardless of any legal procedures which the authorities may formally be required to follow. The state enforcement institutions often do not follow their own laws and procedures because they are not here to defend the law. They are here to protect the interests of the rich ruling class. This has been the case since the colonial conquest of Australia when the armed personnel of the invading power brutally suppressed Aboriginal peoples’ resistance to the conquest of their lands occupied by the wealthy amongst the colonialists. Since then, these enforcement organs have attacked the picket lines of striking workers, broken strikes, attacked pro-worker and leftist demonstrations, evicted tenants, harassed the homeless, enforced the racist oppression of Aboriginal people and unleashed attacks on scapegoated “ethnic” communities. It is true that police do sometimes catch a rapist or murderer. However, their political function is to enforce the rule of the capitalist, big business owners over the masses. Every time there is a clash between the propertied, exploiting class and the working class masses, the state machine becomes perfected and more entrenched in this purpose and the armed personnel themselves become more conscious of their role. That is why the police and sheriffs are not at all workers in the way that electricians, nurses, construction workers, wharfies and IT workers, for example, are. They are, instead, the hired enforcers of the big end of town. Enforcers who, every time they do a job on the masses, become more and more hardened in their commitment to serve those at the top of this unequal society. With every dirty deed done they become more apt at “justifying” this role to themselves with patronising notions that those doing it the hardest are lazy or otherwise “deserve” their plight and that those resisting the dominance of the ruling class are people causing trouble just for the sake of it. Thus the likes of police, sheriffs, prison guards and prosecutors should have no place in our union movement. Even when they are polite to us that is only so long as we do not resist the unfair status quo in society. It is also, often, just to give us a false sense of security. Many a striking worker has experienced police coming to a picket and joining workers at the BBQ or even kicking a footy around with picketers but the very next day coming back in force with batons unleashed to try and smash the picket and get scabs through.

The laws and regulations that the authorities impose are there to suppress us. Even when there are certain regulations which we have fought for and won to somewhat constrain their powers, they will violate these rules – to the extent we let them get away with it – if that helps them carry out their role of enforcing the interests of the big end of town. We must plan our strategies based on this core understanding.

Another lesson from the 32 High St struggle concerns the role of the media. Over the last several years, the mainstream Australian media has vilified and mocked public housing tenants. However, given the widespread support for public housing in inner-city Sydney, the media occasionally had to give more sympathetic coverage to the plight of Millers Point tenants. Yet, when the struggle against the sell-off of public housing in Millers Point, the Rocks and Dawes Point was taken to a higher, more powerful level through the blockade at 32 High St, the mainstream media again turned more hostile. Channel 7, owned by high- living billionaire Kerry Stokes as well as the government-owned ABC were, in particular, the most shameless in promoting the NSW government and state bureaucrat slanders against the evicted tenant. The mainstream media are happy to occasionally run a sympathetic piece when working class people are simply victims but once we fight back we see the media’s true colours. Their coverage will reflect the class interests of those that own or control them – that is, ultra-wealthy businessmen in the case of Channel 7 or, in the case of the ABC, the rich people’s state that serves the capitalists. We should not expect any support from the mainstream media and, most importantly, we must not tailor our struggles just to try and win support from this media. If, as an exception, the media do happen to give non-hostile coverage to one of our struggles then well and good. But we should do what is best to make our struggles as powerful as possible rather than what will be most acceptable to these hired mouthpieces of billionaire tycoons and capitalist governments.

Even more importantly, what the struggle to stop the eviction at 32 High Street confirmed yet again is that no reliance should be placed on pro-capitalist politicians – even when they claim to be on working class people’s side on a particular issue. Over the last few years, several of these politicians have stated support for the Millers Point and Sirius public housing communities. A few of these politicians have spoken out loudly and passionately against the NSW Coalition government’s sell-off plan for the Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point area. Some have even spoken at rallies protesting against the sell-off of public housing in the area including Labor federal deputy opposition leader, Tanya Plibersek, Labor NSW shadow minister for social housing, Tania Mihailuk, state MP for Sydney, Alex Greenwich (an independent), several Greens politicians, “independent” Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore and even arch-right wing reactionary Christian Democrat, Fred Nile. However, when Peter Muller was facing eviction and protesters blockaded 32 High Street to try and stop it, most of these politicians refused to take any public stand in support of the action – either verbally or in action. A partial exception was Greens state upper house member, David Shoebridge, who, to his credit, showed up to support the blockade on the first morning. Although some Greens leaders had privately promised that they would bring big numbers to support the blockade, Shoebridge was the lone Greens representative that participated. However, after saying at the blockade “we’re not going anywhere,” Shoebridge then failed to follow through: after the media slandered the tenant and then after the sheriffs and cops were able to enforce the eviction, he did not make any public stand or statement in support of the tenant or the struggle to stop the eviction.

The problem is that the various ALP, Greens and “progressive independent” politicians are as committed to upholding the existing economic-political system as the Liberals. Granted that, unlike the openly anti-working class conservatives, these “progressive” politicians would prefer it if there were some reforms to make life easier for the masses. However, because they acquiesce to the current social “order” and, hence, are committed to accepting its power structures, they are so fixated on not scaring away, or even annoying, the big capitalists that every time working class people engage in an intransigent struggle that can actually make a difference – like a blockade to prevent the eviction of a public housing tenant – their first instinct is to run a mile. Furthermore, with the partial exception of the Greens, these “progressive” politicians do not have any broader commitment to public housing themselves. To be sure, they are against the complete sell-off of public housing in the inner- city because they accept that working class people should be allowed to make up a proportion of city residents. Furthermore, they know that the campaign to save public housing in the Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point area is popular and, thus, there are votes in it for them! However, overall they have no commitment to decisively increasing the amount of public housing. Far from it! As we have noted above, the ALP while in government federally by itself – and when in government in a de-facto coalition with the Greens – oversaw the slashing of the amount of public housing. Today, they join the Liberals in hiding behind rhetoric about a commitment to “social housing,” while calling for public housing to be converted into “community” housing which, as we have described above, is a big and sorry step towards full privatisation.

It is worth noting that the large banner that hung over the 32 High St blockade, stating “Massively Increase Public Housing Now,” was actually first used in a protest against Tanya Plibersek when she was the federal housing minister in the first Rudd government. One of our comrades made that banner for that November 2009 protest that Trotskyist Platform called outside Tanya Plibersek’s office because of the then ALP federal government’s woefully inadequate outlay of resources for public housing. That rally turned out to be the first on the streets action for public housing in NSW in the resurgence of activism around defence of public housing that has taken place over the last seven and a half years and which must be, now, desperately intensified. As a representative of the CFMEU construction workers union, delivering a message of solidarity to that 2009 rally from the union’s then NSW president, stated: “since the mid-1970s, successive Governments have failed to adequately deliver sufficient public housing for those in our society who need such shelter.” Indeed, then housing minister Tanya Plibersek later joined with the then ALP NSW government to orchestrate the sell-off of large amounts of public housing in Claymore near Campbelltown and in Glebe. This added to similar schemes already being implemented by the then ALP state government to reduce the proportion of public housing in Minto and Bonyrigg. In Claymore, the Plibersek-NSW ALP government joint plan involved the privatisation of a quarter of the public housing in what had been the biggest public housing estate in NSW (see Plibersek’s own press release here: http://www.formerministers.dss.gov.au/2181/tp_m_ nswhousingprojects_7june2010/) – a disastrous outcome for working class people that was deepened even further by subsequent conservative NSW governments.

Left, Millers Point, May 2017: A huge banner calling for a massive increase in public housing flies proudly above the 32 High St blockade by trade unionists and other supporters of public housing. This banner was initially made for the 5 November 2009 protest outside the office of then federal housing minister, Tanya Plibersek. That rally (Right) was the first on-the-streets action for public housing in NSW in contemporary times.

The fact is that when it was in government in NSW, the ALP actually sold off more public housing than the arrogant Liberals later have. Thus, in the last eight years of the former ALP government up to 2011, they slashed the public housing stock in NSW by 11%. When population growth is taken into account, this represents a cut in the amount of public housing coverage by close to one in five. Indeed, it was that previous ALP state government that actually began the sale of public housing in Millers Point. In two lots, they sold off 36 vacant homes (http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/residents-stick-to-their-point-of- community-20121025-288bh.html) in the late noughties while holding back on the repair and maintenance of the existing homes. This paved the way for the conservatives to come in with their sledge hammer approach and sell off the houses from under the very feet of public housing tenants.

In the case of Tanya Plibersek there is also a particular conflict of interest that, additionally, holds her back from following through on her claimed support for public housing in the area. Her husband, Michael Coutts-Trotter is one of the chief bureaucrats overseeing the sell-off of public housing in the Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point area. He is the head of the Department of Family and Community Services. When the government announced its decision to sell off the public housing in the area, Coutts-Trotter stood right alongside Community Services minister, Pru Goward, in pushing the lies and spin justifying the sale, stating that:

“There is massive demand for residential housing in this area; it [the sell- off] is going to free up a very large amount of money for reinvestment in social housing.”

– The Sydney Morning Herald, 19 March 2014, http://www. smh.com.au/nsw/sydney-waterfront-public-housing-proper- ties-to-be-sold-off-20140319-351fs.html

Even more significant here than any personal conflict of interest for Plibersek is the more fundamental conflict between the ALP’s stated purpose to improve the lives of working class people and the reality that its strategy to achieve this, through administering the capitalist state, necessarily – whether the particular individual involved is taking part in administering this state as a high-level bureaucrat or as a government minister – means enforcing the interests of the capitalist exploiters against the interests of working class people.

That is why the struggle for public housing – just like all campaigns for the rights of working class people – must not rely at all on pro-capitalist politicians but, instead, rely entirely on the power and unity of working class people, our trade unions and other downtrodden sections of the community. Most crucially, we must ensure that the direction of the movement is not in the least modified to ensure acceptance by any mainstream politicians that state support for the campaign. Given that those pro-establishment politicians claiming to support the Millers Point struggle are not more broadly for public housing, they have been pulling the campaign towards narrowly focusing on the particularities of the Millers Point/Rocks/ Dawes Point area rather than emphasising that the campaign is part of the overall fight to defend public housing everywhere. Any step in this direction weakens the ability of the campaign to inspire broader support from public housing tenants elsewhere, from those on the public housing waiting list and from other opponents of privatisation. Furthermore, any narrowing of the focus to just the Millers Point/Rocks/Dawes Point area can end up being manipulated by the NSW Liberal government to spin its devious narrative about the issue. As we saw all too clearly with the struggle to stop the eviction at 32 High St, the state government is trying to sell people the utterly despicable and cynical lie that they are selling off public housing in Millers Point for the good of public housing elsewhere and that those tenants resisting are selfish people protecting their own interests at the expense of tenants elsewhere. This underscores why it is vital that the movement disregards the sensibilities of any pro-capitalist politicians pledging support and ever more forthrightly make front and centre of the campaign the idea that its struggle to stop the sell-off of public housing in the CBD area is part of a broader fight to oppose the slashing of public housing everywhere and is, in fact, part and parcel of the struggle to win a massive increase in public housing in Australia. It is a struggle on the side of all public housing tenants, a struggle on the side of all those on the public housing waiting lists, a struggle for the many more working class people who need public housing but aren’t on the waiting list and a fight that stands by the interests of the many working class people who rent privately and face unaffordable rents. More broadly, we must ever more directly locate this campaign as part of the struggle against the ruling class’ attacks on all public services and a struggle against their attacks on our trade unions. Any undermining of public housing is an attack on our unions because like other measures which target the poor and unemployed they make the prospect of life after losing one’s job so unbearably miserable that it can intimidate some workers – fearful of being sacked by the boss or being identified as one of the staunch unionists who are invariably at the top of the bosses’ list to be axed in the event of retrenchments – from participating in the union fight for rights at work.

There’s Still Time Left to Stop and Reverse the Public Housing Sell-Off

It is true that the government has managed to drive out most of the public housing tenants from the Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point area. However, a few tenants remain. Most significantly, many of the public housing dwellings have still not been sold off and still less have been occupied. While vacated houses remain unoccupied there remains the chance to build mass action – buttressed by the power of our trade unions – to reclaim these dwellings for public use. These unoccupied houses should be used to shelter the homeless and those on the public housing waiting list and not sold off to greedy developers and wealthy speculators!

Furthermore, there has been an event internationally that should give this struggle new hope. This is connected to the fact that part of what is driving the NSW government’s obsessive campaign against Millers Point public housing is not only its overall push to slash public housing but, additionally, its subservience to the interests of billionaire James Packer whose Crown Group is building a high rollers casino and six-star hotel in the very nearby Barangaroo. For Packer and his government servants, having working class people in the area is an “eyesore” for the wealthy clientele who they hope will frequent the luxury resort that Packer expects to make billions from. Meanwhile, the NSW government is determined to clear out working class tenants in order to help its rich developer mates make a fortune from turning Millers Point into luxury accommodation for resort executives and patrons. However, although Packer can get whatever he wants in capitalist Australia he found that things are not the same in China. On June 26, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) jailed 16 of his wealthy executives after they all pleaded guilty to charges of illegally luring Chinese high rollers to use Packer’s casinos in Australia and elsewhere. One of Crown corporation’s highest flying executives, Melbourne-based boss of VIP operations Jason O’Connor received a 10 month sentence. The PRC, understandably, wants to stop money flows to casino accounts being used to subvert its strict control on money movements by the rich. Under the PRC’s socialistic system it is public ownership that dominates, not the interests of rich private sector bigwigs. The effect of the PRC’s crackdown is that it has shown Packer and his henchmen that they will not be able to get away with illegally luring casino clients from China. Without customers from the world’s most populous country, Packer’s Barangaroo casino may now be unviable and media are reporting that Crown is reconsidering the entire project. If the resort project is indeed killed off then that would not only potentially allow the scenic Barangaroo area to be used for what it should be – for public recreational space or badly needed public housing – but would also remove part of the fuel powering the government’s turbo-charged drive to kick out public housing tenants from Millers Point. Furthermore, even if the China arrests do not in themselves kill Crown’s casino project, we should use the blow that the Peoples Republic of China has landed against Packer and his henchmen to encourage our own struggle here. For these blows have shown that Packer and his fellow billionaires are not invincible. What we must do is unite working class people to fight back against the tyranny of the tycoons and stand up to the governments and state institutions that serve the marauding tycoons’ interests.

James Packer with Liberal Party prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull. When the NSW Liberal Party sells off public housing in Millers Point it is acting in the interests of James Packer and its other big end of town mates.

The struggle for public housing is a key battleground in the overall struggle of working class people against the all-sided offensive that the capitalist rulers are waging against their rights. For three and a half decades, Australia’s filthy rich corporate bosses and the governments that serve them have waged a war on working class people’s rights: they have sold off public housing, cut off payments to low-income single mothers, made TAFE and university more expensive, underfunded public schools and public hospitals, attacked our unions, casualised the workforce, sacked workers whenever that helps them make even more profits and made life for those not fortunate enough to have a job even more miserable. It is time for us and our unions to fight back! The Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point tenants resisting the sell-off of public housing have opened up a new front in our fightback. Let’s mobilise behind this struggle with ever greater vigour. The way we trade unionists, public housing tenants and other supporters of working class interests were able to repulse the sheriff who was set to evict the 32 High St tenant on the first day of that battle shows the power that we have. By learning the lessons of the subsequent defeat of that 32 High St battle – most importantly that the state institutions were created to serve the exclusive interests of the big end of town which means we cannot trust them to abide by their own rules and procedures – by learning important lessons like this we can win future victories. The way that the public housing tenants and ex-tenants of Millers Point, the Rocks and Dawes Point have so resiliently resisted in the face of incessant pressure should inspire us to give it our best shot. The future rests in our strong, working class hands.

Aboriginal Struggle, Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Imperialism, Anti-Racism, China, Communism, DPRK, Public Housing, Unions, USSR, Women

Issue 19

June 8, 2017

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As Capitalist Rulers Beat on the Unions and Poor: Opposing Racism & “Aussie First” Economic Nationalism Key to Defending Working Class People’s Rights
Tens of Thousands Protest in Australia on the Day of Land Theft & Genocide. Rally Attacked by Ruthless Police
A Hard Right, Racist Bigot Enters the White House Capitalist “Democracy” is a Sham Unleash Industrial Action to Demand Jobs for All Only Workers United with All of the Oppressed Can Bring about Real Change
Expand the Union Action in Defence of Public Housing in Sirius: Fight for a Massive Increase in Public Housing throughout the Country! Still a Chance to Prevent the Destruction of Public Housing in Millers Point and The Rocks
Trotskyist Platform May Day (International Workers Day Statement We Need Militant Class Struggle to Win Secure Jobs for All Workers
Workplace Safety Now Better in China Than in Australia Australian Rulers Union Busting Drive against the CFMEU Union
Threatens Construction Workers Lives
Good News: China’s Arrest of Crown Executives Endangers Packer’s Barangaroo Project James Packer’s Crown Versus Millers Point Public Housing
Free All the Victims of Australia’s Racist Torture! Jail the Cops and Prison Guards Who Killed David Dungay, Ms Dhu, Rebecca Maher, Wayne Morrison, TJ Hickey, Mulrunji & the Many Other Victims of the Racist, Rich People’s State!
Long Live China’s 1949 Anticapitalist Revolution! Protect the Great Benefits for Workers & the Rural Masses Won through the Revolution: Stop Imperialist Funding for Those NGOs that Seek to Overthrow Socialistic Rule in China
Defend the Dominance of Socialistic, State-Ownership in China’s Economy! China: Pro-Worker and Pro-Private Sector Forces Lock Horns
Racist Atrocities in Kalgoorlie
Force Profitable Companies to Increase Hiring – Make Them Wear the Resulting Lower Profits Stop Billionaire Bosses from Retrenching Workers! No to Slave Wage Internships and Work for the Dole! For Fully Paid, Permanent Jobs for All!

Anti-Capitalism, China, Communism, Public Housing, USSR

China: Pro-Worker and Pro-Private Sector Forces Lock Horns

May 30, 2017

Defend the Dominance of Socialistic, State-Ownership in China’s Economy!

Above, a common site in China: youth wearing the communist hammer and sickle emblem. Mass support for communism in China has thus far constrained capitalist restorationist tendencies within sections of the ruling bureaucracy. Photo: Trotskyist Platform

2 December 2016 – Last week, Fidel Castro passed away at age 90. Fidel led the 1959 Revolution that would end up overthrowing capitalism in Cuba and bringing terrific improvements to the lives of the Cuban masses. In response to his death, Chinese president, Xi Jinping lauded Fidel’s achievements. Here are some excerpts of Xi Jinping’s message of condolences to Raul Castro, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba:

Fidel Castro, founder of the Communist Party of Cuba and Cuba’s socialist cause, is a great leader of the Cuban people. He has devoted all his life to Cuban people’s great cause of struggling for national liberation, safeguarding state sovereignty and building socialism.

He has made immortal historic contributions to the Cuban people and to the world socialism development.

The Cuban and Latin American people lost an excellent son, and the Chinese people lost a close comrade and sincere friend. His glorious image and great achievements will go down in history.

I believe that under the strong leadership of Comrade Raul Castro, the Communist Party of Cuba, the Cuban government and its people will carry on the unfinished lifework of Comrade Fidel Castro, turn sorrow into strength and keep making new achievements in the cause of socialist construction.

Xinhua, 26 November 2016

President Xi’s fulsome praise for Fidel and Cuba’s socialistic path reflects the fact that China itself is under socialistic rule. While Cuba’s revolution came in 1959 and was the first – and to date – only decisively anti-capitalist revolution in the Western Hemisphere, China’s anti-capitalist revolution came ten years earlier. It brought the long suffering toiling masses to power in the world’s most populous country and freed China from over a hundred years of humiliating, colonial servitude at the hands of Western and Japanese imperial overlords.

However, the Australian media did their best to hide the substance of the Chinese president’s letter of condolence over the death of Fidel. They reported very briefly that Xi had sent his condolences but made sure they did not report on Xi’s praise for Cuba’s socialist system. Why? Because to do so would highlight the continued socialistic character of the Peoples Republic of China. The mainstream Western media don’t want to do this. In fact, they sometimes even try to make you believe that China has simply “gone capitalist.” To admit otherwise poses a very inconvenient fact for the capitalist media: the fact that the country with the world’s fastest growing economy that has managed to lift hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty – i.e. China – has done so while based on a socialistic system. To admit this blows sky high out of the water the main anti-communist argument that people in the capitalist world are taught from the time they go to school and start watching documentaries: socialism may sound like a fair system but it just does not work in practice.

Top, Harlem, U.S.A, 1960: Fidel Castro meets American black revolutionary leader Malcolm X. Fidel led the 1959 Revolution that would end up overthrowing capitalism in Cuba and bring terrific improvements to the lives of the Cuban masses. When he visited New York for a UN meeting the year after the revolution, he was ostracised by the American establishment. However, in an act of solidarity with the oppressed black peoples of the U.S., Castro then chose to stay at a hotel in the black neighbourhood of Harlem reinforcing his hero status with supporters of black liberation and anti-imperialism. When Castro passed away in November 2016, Red China’s leader Xi Jinping hailed Castro’s “immortal historic contributions to the Cuban people and to the world socialism development.” However, Xi did not attend the funeral for Castro, only sending his vice president Li Yuanchao, seen at the Bottom laying a wreath for Castro at the Jose Marti Memorial in Havana, Cuba. Xi’s choice not to attend Castro’s memorial was no doubt an attempt to placate the far-right, U.S. president elect Donald Trump. Fat good that did the Peoples Republic of China! Trump and Co. wasted no time in attacking China. They even broke with decades of diplomatic protocol by provocatively giving legitimacy to the renegade, capitalist Chinese province of Taiwan. The policy of severely downgrading solidarity with the international struggle for socialism in the name of “peaceful co-existence” with imperialism that is practiced by China’s leaders – as was also practiced by the post-1924 leaders of the former Soviet Union and largely by Castro too after the initial period following the Cuban revolution – harms not only the global socialist struggle but socialistic rule in China itself.

Of course, the capitalist media do very often contradict their own, sometimes used, “gone capitalist” narrative about China. They, indeed, start talking about “communist China” whenever they manage to find an area that they can attack the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) over and exaggerate a problem – like pollution – or when they misrepresent events to accuse the PRC of “human rights violations.” The lying capitalists, actually, know very well that the PRC is not a capitalist entity but a socialistic state. That is why the capitalist-owned media look for any opportunity possible to demonise China, why the U.S. and Australian regimes support anti-PRC NGOs and dissidents within China and why investment from PRC state-owned companies are especially scrutinised by Australian government authorities. Most notably, it is why the Australian military is openly being built up to join the U.S.-led crusade against China even though the PRC is this country’s biggest export market and the main reason the Australian economy has not yet fallen into a new, deep recession.

Just like the Cuban Revolution, the 1949 Chinese Revolution led to tremendous improvements for the masses in life expectancy, literacy, health care and the position of women. Socialistic rule has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of the dire poverty of its pre-1949 days with a speed and depth that is completely unprecedented in human history. However, like in, Cuba these accomplishments are not guaranteed because socialistic rule itself remains fragile in China. It is fragile because at the moment the richest and most powerful countries in the world are under capitalist rule. As the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 showed, even a socialistic state that is a superpower can be destroyed by sustained capitalist military, economic and political pressure.

Furthermore, the ability of the Chinese workers state to withstand external capitalist pressure is weakened by its own bureaucratic deformations – by the fact that the administration of socialistic rule is restricted to a narrow, somewhat privileged bureaucratic layer rather than being run by democratic mass organisations of working class people. This structural deformity arose from the nature of the Chinese Revolution itself. This great revolution was made largely by tens of millions of tenant farmers led by idealistic students, teachers and other intellectuals. Awakened and led by Mao’s Communist Party of China, the tenant famers fought with immense heroism to make the revolution. However, tenant farmers, while brutally exploited by the landlords, were still infused with the individualistic strivings that one day they would produce enough to free themselves from landlord domination and make a good income from selling their produce on the market – perhaps even becoming landlords themselves. Therefore, unlike wage workers who are united by their collective labour at the workplace and thus – when under revolutionary political guidance – could self-organise through democratically elected workers councils, the individual tenant farmers could only be fully united from above. This requirement and the practicalities of waging a long, guerrilla war meant that the victorious revolutionary forces and the ensuing workers state that they created had a bureaucratic – rather than a workers’ democratic structure.

In the late 1970s, the Chinese leadership, unable to use the driving and motivating influence of workers’ democracy to push forward production, turned to market reforms to further stimulate economic activity. These reforms would come to include the creation of a capitalist, private sector. In the complicated transition from capitalism to genuine socialism it can be useful to allow a limited private sector. This is especially the case given that before the 1949 Revolution, China was an extremely poor and backward country where the capitalism that existed was intermingled with elements of feudalism. However, the introduction of a private sector and market reforms to China necessarily brought with it greater inequality, increased corruption, some degree of unemployment and a reduction in solidarity between people. Moreover, the new class of, at first small, capitalists created by the reforms used their influence and wealth to lobby for greater and greater openings for the private sector. This influence was amplified because many of these new capitalists had family or other personal ties to the administrative/party bureaucracy. Today, the degree of private sector operation in China is much in excess of what is needed or desirable for the Chinese workers state. To be sure, the private sector bosses do not control the key sectors of the economy which remain under socialistic state ownership and they do not hold state power. However, the danger that the capitalists that do exist in China could organise a capitalist counterrevolution is a very real one. We only have to look at what happened in the former USSR. It was there that market reforms in the mid-1980s, dubbed perestroika (restructuring), created a class of petty capitalists and speculators. Then Soviet leader Gorbachev did not initially intend these reforms to actually lead to a capitalist takeover and at first that is not what perestroika meant. However, the layer of capitalists that Gorbachev’s perestroika created, with backing from a section of the middle-class professionals and student intellectuals – who expected that they would be amongst those who would strike it rich if capitalism was restored – became a powerful lobby force for further perestroika. They shoved Gorbachev and Co. further and further to the right. Each new set of perestroika reforms that Gorbachev implemented strengthened the economic weight and political influence of the new capitalists and whetted the appetite of pro-capitalist students and professionals. Eventually, with the crucial backing of Western imperialism, the new capitalists and their middle class allies were strong enough to grab back state power in the ex-USSR. The forces that made this counterrevolution were actually small in number. Most Soviet workers and collective farmers were not sympathetic to the counterrevolutionary course and many were downright suspicious of the pro-capitalists. However, in the absence of decisive levels of actual struggle to defend the Soviet workers state, the counterrevolutionaries triumphed.

Today, in China, the capitalists do not yet feel strong enough to openly call for capitalist restoration. They leave that to a rather small layer of Western-funded dissidents and NGOs. Indeed some of China’s capitalists even, rather disingenuously, sing the praises of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC). They hope that this will save them from having their businesses shutdown – as has happened to many of their capitalist compatriots. But what these Chinese capitalists do a lot of is to use their wealth and political influence – through bodies like the private sector All China Federation of Industry and Commerce – to push for ever greater openings for the capitalist economic sector. They are assisted in this lobbying by a whole swathe of academics, economists, lawyers and journalists sympathetic to capitalism or at least to a greater role for the capitalist sector. This lobbying is indeed powerful especially when one considers that the relative weight of China’s capitalist class is far in excess of that of the capitalists in the former USSR at the time of the counterrevolution there. Fortunately, however, the resistance of the Chinese working class and staunch subjective communists to pro-capitalist measures – like privatisation – is also far greater than existed in the last period of the USSR. However, it is far from guaranteed that the political consciousness of the working class will always be sufficient to ensure that their resistance can hold back capitalist restorationist forces. The struggle in China between insurgent pro-capitalist forces and those resisting them is a finely balanced battle.

Moscow, August 1991: Western-backed capitalist counterrevolutionaries led by Boris Yeltsin make their grab for power in the former USSR. The social layers driving the counterrevolution were the small-scale capitalists and speculators bred by then Soviet leader Gorbachev’s pro-market, perestroika reforms as well as the pro-capitalist students and professionals whose appetites for making it big time in a future “free market” society were whetted by pro-market reforms. In today’s China, capitalists are bigger than they were in the USSR at the time of counterrevolution there. This shows the danger that socialistic rule in China is under today.

See-Sawing Contest

In the mid and late 2000s, the insurgent pro-capitalist forces in China were pushed back to some extent. China’s political climate in that period was shaped by increased activity of leftist tendencies within the CPC, the manifest weakness of capitalism worldwide as seen in the Great Recession and – most crucially – militant workers struggles for improved wages and conditions and against the few attempts made at privatisation during this period. The period from 2008 to 2011 in particular was the most left-wing period in China in over three decades. This period saw the nationalisation/confiscation of not only many formerly privately owned coal mines but nationalisations across a range of sectors from steel to milk processing to solar cell manufacturing.

However, from about 2012 the political climate in China swung back to the right – at least on economic issues. China’s capitalist class and the host of economists, academics, lawyers and even CPC politicians loyal to them re-asserted themselves. This was reflected in some of the agenda of China’s new number two leader (ranking below president Xi), premier Li Keqiang. Li implemented special measures and tax incentives to help new private businesses. He also pushed for allowing private enterprises access to several areas like oil/gas, infrastructure construction, health care etc which had previously been restricted almost exclusively to publicly owned enterprises. Although the strength of pro-socialist forces is such that no CPC leader openly calls for privatisation of any of China’s major state-owned enterprises, the CPC leadership – including both premier Li and president Xi – have pushed for the sell-off of minority stakes in state-owned enterprises to private investors.

Developments over recent years in China have, of course, not all been in one direction. President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign has genuinely reduced corruption even though there is a suspicion that it has also been used against Xi’s political rivals – including those from the left of the CPC. Importantly, the anti-corruption campaign has protected the assets of state-owned enterprises from being squandered by corrupt state enterprise managers handing contracts to bribe-paying, private business bosses. In a small number of cases, the CPC’s drive against corruption and privilege in government officials has spilled over into healthy moves against opulence in the broader Chinese society. In early 2014, authorities in major Chinese cities ordered the closure of high-end clubs and expensive restaurants in public parks, scenic spots and cultural sites because these venues could not be accessible and affordable to the masses. Those high-end clubs and restaurants that were not closed were ordered to lower their prices and change their menus to turn them into places affordable by the masses. Meanwhile, formerly members-only clubs that were allowed to stay open were ordered to turn into open access venues. Alongside the anti-corruption, anti-opulence campaign, the ruling Communist Party of China has toughened its membership rules to ensure that all party members believe in the party’s stated ideology. On the one hand, this drive for ideological consistency has been, in part, used to silence leftist critics of pro-market reforms within the party. Nevertheless, it has also had positive effects. It has weeded out some ambitious professionals with little solid sympathy for communism who joined the party for merely career reasons and it has deterred capitalist businessmen from joining the party purely to enhance their connections with government. The most important positive developments in PRC politics in recent years is the continuation – and in some cases the deepening – of some of the progressive policies of the previous Hu Jintao government. This includes the moves back to universal public health care, a massive campaign to build and renovate affordable public housing, an increase in social security and pension payments and the enforcement of the drive to improve workplace safety. Most crucially, the new Xi Jinping government has re-committed to the previous Chinese government’s drive to bring every single resident in China above the national poverty line by 2020; and has moved to achieve this goal with renewed vigour.

Furthermore, many of the right-wing economic measures proposed have not been implemented much. Nevertheless, there has been a change in the political discourse from a few years ago. The suspicion of private business bosses that was sometimes seen from CPC officials and Chinese media during the Hu Jintao period, itself a reflection of healthy hostility to capitalists amongst the Chinese working class, is now more and more replaced with praise of their “innovative” capacities and their “entrepreneurship.” Sensing the mood, in March on live TV, China’s then finance minister, Lou Jiwei, ranted against the PRC’s 2008 labour law for being too pro-worker saying that it was contributing to unreasonable wage rises and making it too hard for bosses to sack workers. Although the strongly pro-worker law was not amended, Lou Jiwei’s attack on it represented a clear drive by the most pro-market wing of the Chinese bureaucracy to curb wage rises and slash employment regulations imposed on bosses.

Rightist elements of the CPC leadership – and the academic/economist circles backing them – are also using moves to cut over-capacity in China’s steel and coal sectors as a way to weaken the influence of socialistic state enterprises – state-owned enterprises being dominant in these sectors. Additionally, they are trying to use these cuts as a way to change the culture of PRC state enterprises. They want to prod these socialistic enterprises to retreat from their previous reluctance to lay-off workers and push them into operating more according to “market principles” (i.e. solely according to the profit motive). There is, indeed, over-capacity in China’s steel and coal sectors – the latter because China is moving intensively away from coal and onto renewable energy sources like hydro, wind and solar. However, not only should these cuts to overall capacity be done in a way that guarantees equivalent paying jobs for all workers moved out of these sectors but it should be done by forcibly closing the, often, poor safety and high polluting private enterprises that are part of these sectors. That would not only ensure that the tens of millions of workers remaining in these sectors have the best possible working conditions but would also make a huge boost to workplace safety in the dangerous coal sector in particular. Yet, thus far, the cuts to overcapacity seem to be roughly in proportion to the relative weights of socialistic and private enterprises in these sectors.

However, these recent pro-market measures have met with mass resistance. In March, thousands upon thousands of coal mine workers employed by state-owned Longmay Group marched through the northeastern Chinese city of Shuangyashan to protest against wage arrears resulting from the provincial government holding back support to the struggling company in order to push it into slashing the size of its workforce. A large number of similar workers’ protests and strikes have taken place throughout China in state enterprises facing similar predicaments. Meanwhile, Chinese people used social media to bitterly attack then finance minister Lou Jiwei’s criticism of China’s pro-worker labour laws. A comment made by Weibo (China’s popular social media platform) user, Se Kong Se Kong, typified the reaction to the ex-finance minister’s tirade:

Have him investigated ….

He’s no good if he’s speaking on behalf of the capitalists!

Financial Times, 10 March 2016.

All this protest and defiance from Chinese workers and leftists has had an impact. For instance, two weeks ago, rightist Lou Jiwei, was unceremoniously dumped as China’s finance minister two years before his term was due to end (he has since been given a much lower-ranking post). This was, no doubt, at least partially related to his anti-working class comments attacking China’s Labour Law and to the spirited mass opposition to his tirade. It was also reportedly connected to his pro-“free market” opposition to large state investment in infrastructure and fixed assets by local governments. Meanwhile, the huge Shuangyashan city protest by Longmay Group workers led the Heilongjiang provincial government to back down within hours of the workers’ action. The provincial government and its Governor, Lu Hao, apologised to the workers and arranged to fund the struggling state-owned company so that it could pay the workers the wages owed to them. More broadly, the PRC government has responded to workers’ concerns by stepping up efforts to ensure that workers laid off from steel and coal enterprises will be re-hired in state infrastructure projects, state-owned farms and state forestry projects immediately after – or in some cases even before – losing their previous jobs. Meanwhile, some state-owned firms cutting capacity in the steel and coal sectors have started up operations – even loss making ones – in often very different industries in order to avoid laying off workers. State owned coal companies in China’s main coal producing province, Shanxi, have set up pharmacies, solar power stations, restaurants, supermarkets and vegetable and fruit planting to move their workers into. One state-owned coal company, Qianhe Coal Industry, that had to cut its capacity, started organising its workers into production of food products – including tofu and potato noodles – in order to pacify its workforce. It is now even going to move its operations entirely from coal producing to the food products industry – even though its new area of operation is not currently profitable (Quartz, 31 March 2016).

Such moves by state-owned enterprises are significant as they undercut the agenda of rightists within the CPC and Chinese and Western “experts” who all hoped that downsizing in China’s state-owned coal and steel enterprises would help wean China’s state-owned enterprises away from their devotion to preserving workers’ jobs and push them onto the profit first path. For his part, premier Li has been forced into a partial back down in two key areas by the workers protest and leftist agitation. Firstly, Li and the rightist advisors and economists influencing him, were pushing for more unprofitable state-owned enterprises – dubbed “zombie industries” – to be forced into bankruptcy and, thus, into retrenching their workers. Although this plan is partially still going ahead, last month the PRC government announced a scheme whereby those holding the debts of enterprises would be able to swap them for equity. In other words, the mainly state-owned banks owed money by indebted companies will end up taking stakes in these companies allowing the companies to wipe out their debts and continue operation. The companies that will mainly benefit are state-owned enterprises as struggling private companies usually simply shut down and retrench all their workers when in financial trouble rather than maintaining major unpayable debts for long periods. For those private companies that are indebted the scheme will facilitate them to be effectively part-nationalised, since state-owned banks will end up owning significant equity stakes in them. Secondly, Li has, in practice, been forced to retreat from his promise to refrain from using large-scale state investment to stimulate the economy. The angry protests by state enterprise employees threatened with unemployment forced premier Li to boost state spending on infrastructure and development projects in order to create jobs for displaced former coal and steel sector workers to be moved into. For example, three months ago, the Chinese government announced an over $A300 billion plan to fund 130 projects in the north-eastern region of China – the part of the country with a disproportionately large concentration of enterprises in the steel and coal sectors.

The PRC government’s return to emphasis on state investment is driven not only by the imperative to respond to workers’ concerns but also, in part, by pure economic reality. The fact is that with the world capitalist economy – and thus demand for Chinese exports – in the doldrums and with profit-driven, Chinese private sector bosses less willing to make productive investments in the real economy because their ability to make profits has been curtailed by rising workers’ wages in China and the 2008 pro-worker Labour Law, the PRC government needs state-owned enterprises to drive growth. To put it simply: capitalism doesn’t work but socialism does and thus the PRC government, regardless of the political leanings of some of its key personnel, must once again rely on the socialistic state sector to shore up the economy. That is why despite all the special tax concessions and other incentives given to private enterprises, Chinese private investment in fixed assets grew by less than 3% in the first ten months of this year while investment by the state sector surged by over 20%.

A similar story can be seen if we look at the issue of administrative measures imposed on the housing market. During the period of Hu Jintao’s presidency from 2002 to 2012, Chinese governments imposed a series of measures to reduce housing speculation in key areas in order to make house prices more affordable to the masses and to ensure that housing construction was geared towards the needs of low and middle income earners. These measures included requirements for developers to meet certain minimum proportions of smaller housing, restrictions on the number of houses that people could own and regulations that made banks charge higher interest rates – and require higher down payments – for those buying second homes as opposed to those buying first ones. As part of these measures many major Chinese cities banned people from owning more than two homes. However, private sector housing developers and pro-“free market” economists, journalists and other “experts” complained bitterly that the measures were “distorting the market” and undermining the “healthy development of housing supply.” These voices obtained a bigger hearing from Chinese leaders in the post-Hu period and as a result in the 2013 to 2015 period some of the administrative restrictions on speculation were relaxed. However, that led to a rebound in speculation and opulent purchases of multiple house by the wealthy. Though this squeezed many lower-income people out of the private housing market, fortunately China has massively built public rental housing to enable lower income people to still get stable accommodation. In the last few months, however, the Chinese government has again returned to anti-market, administrative measures to curtail housing speculation and restrict the wealthy from buying up multiple houses.

The clearest sign that the political winds blowing to the Right in China are starting to recede was seen last month at a high profile meeting of government leaders and state enterprise heads about the direction of state-owned enterprises. The main theme of the meeting was president Xi Jinping’s insistence that it is imperative to: “unswervingly uphold the party’s leadership in state-owned enterprises, and fully play the role of party organs in leadership and political affairs (South China Morning Post, 12 October 2016). Xi insisted that any “weakening, fading, blurring or marginalisation” of party leadership in state firms would not be tolerated.” The meeting vowed to turn around the situation whereby the party’s presence in state-owned enterprises had started to gradually fade into the background over recent decades as these public sector companies became influenced by Western corporations. At the conference, which was notably held when pro-private sector prime minister Li Keqiang was away on an overseas trip, Xi also insisted that China’s state-owned enterprises are an important material and political basis for socialism and called to make these public enterprises stronger, bigger and better (Xinhua, 11 October 2016). This was a clear statement in defence of state-owned enterprises from China’s top leader and a slap in the face to others within and around the CPC trying to weaken them. Furthermore, by insisting on strengthening Communist Party control of state-owned enterprises Xi also contradicted statements by some Chinese leaders – including, to some extent, his own previous statements – calling to turn these state-owned enterprises into more profit-driven corporations. Thus, Xi’s speech at the conference ordered that state-owned enterprises should become important forces to implement decisions of the CPC Central Committee as well as to enhance overall national power, economic and social development and people’s wellbeing. This means that, at least according to the speech, the PRC state-enterprises would re-commit to maximising employment and protecting working conditions as a goal in itself, rebuffing the drive by some within the PRC bureaucracy to push the public sector enterprises into slashing their workforces. Notably, the Xinhua article on the state-owned enterprise work conference reported that Xi stressed the importance of protecting state owned enterprise workers’ rights to know, participate, express and supervise within the enterprises. He added that important matters concerning the immediate interests of workers must be submitted to workers’ congresses for deliberation and the system to ensure workers’ representation as the directors and supervisors of state-owned enterprises should also be improved.

An important positive consequence of this PRC government drive to increase Communist Party control of state-owned enterprises is that it will undercut their own plan to allow private investors to take minority stakes in state-owned enterprises. After all, if Communists are to be running these enterprises and if they are not going to subordinated to the profit motive but also be directed to meet national and social goals – like maximising employment, improving workplace safety, developing poorer parts of the country and spearheading the development of new industries– then what money-grubbing, capitalist investor in their right mind would want to put their money into them! This is especially the case when one considers that the rate of profit return on PRC state-owned enterprises is already only around half that of capitalist enterprises. These public sector enterprises – despite the often monopoly position they hold in Chinese markets – are simply not geared to the blind drive for profits and that is a good thing! Consequently, premier Li Keqiang’s “mixed ownership reform” – to bring private investment into state-owned enterprises – has often not led to the intended consequences. The most touted example of a “mixed-ownership reform” in recent years was Chinese state-owned oil refining giant Sinopec’s decision to sell-off a 30% stake in its distribution and marketing business to “private” investors. However, in the end it was other state-owned companies that bought up nearly two-thirds of this stake. A similar story occurred when China’s main oil producer, state-owned Petrochina, decided to sell-off half of its Central Asian pipelines. The announcement caused considerable excitement amongst Chinese capitalists and pro-“free market” economists and amongst Western “experts” and business journals. Yet, in the end, the entire stake simply went to another PRC state-owned company!

Profile of China’s Pro-Capitalist Advocates

Like the Western-funded NGOs seeking to undermine socialistic rule in China, locally emerged pro-capitalist voices in China shroud their agenda with calls for “democracy.” Billionaire venture capitalist Wang Gongquan (Left) is among China’s best known “pro-democracy” dissidents. He wants a Western-style (i.e. bourgeois) “democracy” so that the wealthy will be able to use their financial resources and connections to dominate the political agenda. A fan of Wang is Chinese property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang (Right), himself a very prominent “pro-democracy” advocate who opposes the Communist Party censoring publications that call for Western-style “democracy.” Ren is also an ardent critic of the PRC government’s administrative measures that restrict the rich from dominating the housing market. Showing his contempt for the poor, Ren once said that commercial residential housing is meant to be for the rich not the poor.

Smash the Political Influence of the Capitalist Class!

Despite what appears to be the first signs of a possible tilt back to the left in China in recent months, as long as there is a capitalist class in the PRC able to wield some political influence then the danger of capitalist counterrevolution is acute. Especially when capitalists within China have family, personal and cultural ties to the ethnic Chinese capitalists who rule Taiwan and Singapore, enjoy economic dominance in Hong Kong and Macao and also form a component of the capitalist ruling classes in places like Malaysia and the Philippines. Moreover, the U.S., British, Japanese, Australian and other imperialist ruling classes are working feverishly to undermine socialistic rule in China.

The response of China’s ruling bureaucracy to the threat of counterrevolution is not to organise for a struggle to outright smash the capitalist threat. Instead, they seek a balance – a truce – between, on the one hand, socialistic rule in China and, on the other, the out of power capitalists within China and the capitalist classes that rule most of the rest of the world. However, such a strategy is in the long run untenable. Socialism and capitalism cannot, ultimately, co-exist. We should remember that from the mid-1920s onwards – when the leadership of the former Soviet workers state started to move away from the truly revolutionary internationalist perspective that guided the 1917 socialist revolution – the USSR’s leaders tried a variant of the policy currently pursued by Beijing. And look what happened there!

The force that has a clear interest in waging a struggle against the capitalists to the end is the Chinese working class. Time and again, as China’s capitalists looked to be set to gain the economic weight, momentum and popular acceptance necessary to make an open bid for power, struggles of the Chinese working class and agitation by leftist elements within the CPC have intervened to push the capitalists back. Today, these forces must resist any sell-offs of minority stakes in state-owned enterprises to private investors. They must breathe life into the workers’ congresses in these enterprises and use them as a force to defend working conditions for workers and to ensure that the state-owned enterprises stay committed to overall social goals and maximising employment rather than to the blind drive to maximise profit. The Chinese working class and leftists must also defend the 2008 Labour Law against any attempt to weaken its pro-worker provisions and must, instead, fight for the strengthening of these laws. They should build workers’ committees – drawing into them staunchly pro-communist officials, police and Peoples Liberation Army soldiers – to investigate enterprises and ensure strict enforcement of the Labour Law’s pro-worker provisions. Such committees would fight for a policy whereby any private business that violates the Labour Law or any safety regulation is immediately confiscated by the PRC state and turned into a publicly owned enterprise. All these struggles should be part of a fight to smash the political influence of the capitalists and restrict the private sector to the level that is actually needed in the transition stage to socialism. Of course, the capitalists, their allies within the upper middle class and their imperialist backers would furiously oppose such a struggle. In the resulting decisive clash between the politically conscious working class and pro-capitalist forces the tightrope balancing act played by the current ruling bureaucracy would be shaken out of existence. The different elements of the bureaucracy would be flung onto two opposing sides. Those types, like pro-capitalist ex-finance minister, Lou Jiwei, who are closest to the capitalists would fall squarely on the capitalist their side. On the other hand, more subjectively communist elements and those closest to the masses would end up on the side of the working class (as would, inevitably, some careerist elements who see the inevitability of a workers’ victory). Thus, a workers struggle to smash the capitalists’ political influence and curb their economic power would not only fortify the PRC workers state but would also lead to the political administration of the PRC passing from the wavering hands of the bureaucracy and on to the control of the councils of workers and their allies that had just organised the defeat of the insurgent capitalists. The genuine communists who would guide such a struggle by the pro-socialist working class would understand that such a victory cannot be truly secure while the capitalists hold state power in nearly all the most powerful countries in the world. That is why they would link the struggle to defeat the insurgent capitalists within China to a perspective of solidarity with the workers and oppressed all around the globe in their struggles against their capitalist rulers.

The biggest impediment to such an outcome is that, currently, the international factors weighing on the class contest in China are almost entirely on the side of the insurgent capitalists. We workers and leftists in the imperialist countries need to change this and change this fast! The workers movement here should oppose political attacks on the PRC workers state from Australia’s capitalist regime (including those made under the pretext of “human rights”) and must oppose the anti-PRC Chinese exile organisations. We must build solidarity actions with progressive actions by the PRC workers state such as the implementation of pro-worker labour laws and the massive increase of public housing. The Australian working class and its allies must also stand against the U.S./Australian capitalist rulers’ military build up against China and must oppose their anti-PRC provocations in the South China Sea as the capitalist powers want all this military pressure to add to the all-round political squeeze that they are subjecting the PRC workers state to.

The incoming Trump regime in the U.S. has promised a still more aggressive posture towards China as well as a massive military build up. Today, as a blatant provocation against Red China, president-elect Trump broke with diplomatic protocol and held a phone call with the president of Taiwan, the part of China that the defeated capitalists seized when they were booted out of power by the 1949 anti-capitalist revolution. This is the first known contact between a U.S. president or president-elect and a leader of the rogue province of Taiwan since the United States broke diplomatic relations with Taiwan 37 years ago. The U.S. backs and massively arms Taiwan but adopted the diplomatic position of not recognising Taiwan as a way to way to maintain diplomatic and, hence, trade relations with the PRC while simultaneously undertaking its anti-PRC machinations. Trump’s phone call with the Taiwanese leader and their discussion about how to boost Taiwan’s military strength – inevitably against the PRC – is a signal that U.S. imperialism is going to unleash a more openly confrontational policy against socialistic China. Genuine communists living in the U.S. and its imperialist allies like Australia have got our work cut out. Let’s get to it!

Anti-Capitalism, China, Public Housing, Unions

James Packer’s Crown Versus Millers Point Public Housing

May 30, 2017

Good News: China’s Arrest of Crown Executives Endangers Packer’s Barangaroo Project

Above Left, Australia, 2016: Police harass a homeless Aboriginal family in Sydney’s Belmore Park. In Australia, the legal system targets the working class and people on the lowest income. Aboriginal people are hit with severe racist, anti-working class repression with many Aboriginal people being killed in state custody. By contrast, in socialistic China, where the overall rate of imprisonment is much lower than Australia, the system is toughest on rich capitalists and corrupt government officials. Above Right: Xu Ming, one of many billionaires jailed in China. In December 2015, this capitalist exploiter, who was once one of China’s richest people, died in state custody at age 44. James Packer is used to Australia’s system where his exorbitant wealth and economic power buys great political influence. However, his assumption that things would be the same in the Peoples Republic of China have started to bring him a rude shock.

18 November 2016 – Greedy billionaire, James Packer, has been riding high. He was expecting to make an absolute fortune from his Crown Resorts casino and luxury hotel complex which will be built in the Sydney CBD’s, Barangaroo site. However, he was brought back down to earth a bit last month when authorities of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) detained 18 of his wealthy executives. Among the high-flying Crown executives that the PRC has arrested are at least three Australian ones including Crown’s boss of VIP operations, Jason O’Connor. Those arrested are alleged to have been involved in organising the very activities that Packer’s high rollers’ casino will in good part depend on: luring high rollers from China to gamble at his casinos and other wealthier Chinese to hold their money in overseas casino accounts. Luring Chinese people to do this is illegal under PRC law. Packer and his executives knew all this. But they were so greedy that they could not help themselves and thought they would get away with it anyway. After all, in capitalist Australia, Packer and his ilk always get away with whatever they want! However, China is a very different story. In socialistic China, the “right” of business tycoons and other rich individuals to ride roughshod over everyone else and make a mockery of state laws is severely “repressed.” The PRC, understandably, does not want wealthy individuals depositing money in overseas casino accounts as that could be used to circumvent its strict capital controls which restrict the “rights” of the rich to freely move money about internationally. China also does not want corrupt businessmen and officials to use overseas casinos to launder dirty money or avoid taxes.

If Crown’s efforts to lure Chinese high rollers and wealthy individuals are severely curtailed, it could spell doom for Packer’s Barangaroo complex. Although the proportion of high rollers in China is tiny, China has such a huge population (60 times that of Australia) that these high rollers are, numerically, a big number. Furthermore, since gambling is outright banned in mainland China and PRC authorities have been cracking down on wealthy mainlanders travelling to Macao to gamble, Chinese high rollers now need to travel abroad to gamble. Similarly, other wealthy Chinese individuals need to deal with casinos located overseas in order to secretly move or launder money. That is why Packer was counting on luring Chinese high rollers to Barangaroo as a main income source for his casino.

One of the many positive aspects of the China arrests for working class people in Australia is that it could help the struggle to save public housing in Sydney’s Millers Point area which is right adjacent to the waterside Barangaroo site. Several of the Millers Point tenants who have been staunchest in resisting the NSW government’s drive to sell off public housing in the area are convinced that part of what is driving the government’s moves is Packer’s, very nearby, casino/hotel project. Their suspicions sound more than plausible. Certainly, it is beyond question that mainstream politicians of all stripes and states are servile to Packer. As the The Saturday Paper (12 April 2014) put it when describing the way that Packer received official backing for his Barangaroo plan:

State and federal laws and regulations have flexed or melted away in the project’s path. Ordinary rules don’t seem to apply to James Packer.

Thus, after the cabinet of corrupt then premier Barry O’Farrell openly announced its backing of the Packer plan, it appointed to head the “independent” detailed assessment of the project, David Murray, an ex-banker and a Liberal party supporter who has such close ties to Packer that he attended Packer’s first wedding! This “assessment” ended up being even more farcical than expected. The “independent” panel chose to seek their commercial advice about Crown’s proposal from Deloitte which has had a financial relationship with Crown. Meanwhile, it was uncovered that even before the “independent” panel had made its “assessment,” the NSW Premier’s department prepared it with statements to help it defend the Crown proposal from any negative media questioning! After bowing to a notably low tax rate for the planned casino, the state government then further facilitated Packer’s interests by ramming through a 2013 amendment to the Casino Control Act specifically to support Packer’s Barangaroo project. This special change to the Act had the support of not just the governing conservative Coalition but also the ALP and the Shooters Party. Even Fred Nile, supposedly a vehement opponent of gambling, campaigned strongly in favour of it. These amendments to the Act are so slavish to Packer that they ensure that Crown must be paid compensation if any future regulatory changes – like tax increases – hurt its profits. The Act even stipulates that the Independent Licensing and Gaming Authority (ILGA) cannot make any changes’s to a Barangaroo casino license without approval from Packer’s Crown! Not that the ILGA is prepared to stand up to Packer anyway. When, the following year, this “independent” authority conducted its probity check on Crown’s suitability to hold a casino license, the ILGA took only three months to pass Crown which, in the own words of the ILGA chief Micheil Brodie, “probably rates as one of the fastest assessments of a casino applicant in history”. Meanwhile, not only has Packer’s complex been infamously excluded from Sydney’s controversial lockout laws, it was granted a special exemption from workplace health and safety laws restricting smoking in indoor workplaces. As Australian Institute of Architects NSW president, Shaun Carter, put it after Crown’s casino/luxury hotel complex was granted final planning approval this June:

In Sydney you can end up in the Land and Environment Court over a dormer window. But at Barangaroo, you can double your size and replace a public park with a casino with no trouble at all.
http://architectureau.com/articles/approval-of-crown-barangaroo-tower-disappointing-institute-says/

The Reality of Capitalist “Democracies”

James Packer’s massive, $105 million luxury yacht and his $66 million private jet. Like other capitalist tycoons, Packer uses his immense wealth and economic power to gain political influence. Packer is great mates with former prime minister Tony Abbott [Above Right], current prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and most other top politicians.

In this capitalist society money buys influence. Filthy rich tycoons are able to swing political and bureaucratic decision making through giving hefty donations to political parties, through buying expensive newspaper advertisements (such as the full page ones that Packer’s Crown made promoting its Barangaroo plans) and by having membership in business lobby groups. It is well known that some of the ultra-rich also openly buy out politicians and government officials through open bribery or through purchasing them other favours – like liaisons with high-priced prostitutes. More common, however, are the softer – and yet more insidious – forms of buying influence that almost all capitalist bigwigs engage in. These include inviting politicians and bureaucrats to corporate boxes to watch the cricket or inviting them to exclusive parties and cruises on their luxury yachts. The ultra-rich capitalists also buy political influence through more subtle means – for example, through funding the arts. On 12 November 2013, the very eve of the day that the NSW parliament voted on amendments to facilitate his Barangaroo project, Packer ostentatiously announced a $60 million donation to various Sydney arts, theatre, opera and orchestra institutions by both his Crown Group and himself personally. This was intended to put pressure on any politicians who may have been considering voting down the amendment with the prospect of gaining the opprobrium of the arts community. Meanwhile, any politicians concerned that open support for Packer’s unpopular Baranagroo project could damage their image would now be re-assured that Packer’s donation would make him be seen by the public in better light. Furthermore, although $60 million is barely pocket money for a person who has a $5 billion fortune (“earned” by his and famous late father and grandfather’s ripping off of the labour of workers), it represents a lot of money to underfunded arts institutions. Imagine a talented young artist asking to get funding from a head of one these Packer-donated institutions for a project satirising the Banagaroo complex. It’s a sure bet that they won’t get very far!

We cannot, of course, forget the lobbyists – a big factor in modern-day capitalist “democracies.” It is only the super-rich who can afford to hire skilled lobbyists. Packer, for example, employed former ALP heavies Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar to use their connections to ensure that the ALP backed the casino. In general, business bosses like to employ former – and, if they can get away with it, even current – politicians and high-level bureaucrats to be on their boards in order to use the connections of these individuals to gain them extra influence in the machinery of state. Thus, amongst the board of directors of Packer’s Crown is former Minister of Communications in the Howard government, Helen Coonan. For his part, Crown CEO Rowen Craigie was a General Manager for Gaming at the Victorian TAB and held senior economic policy positions in Treasury and the Department of Industry in Victoria. Another Crown director, former Qantas boss, Geoff Dixon, was head of the Australian government’s main tourism authority, Tourism Australia, from 2009-2015: that is, throughout the crucial period when Packer was seeking government backing for his Barangaroo project. Big-time capitalists use a similar method to help ensure media support. Thus, the executive deputy chairman of Crown, John Alexander, is a director of Seven West Media – the owner of Channel 7 and its offshoots as well as Yahoo7. He is also a former editor in chief of both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review. Even more effective in ensuring media support is simple, direct ownership. Packer, himself, directly owns a $28 million stake in the entity that owns Channel 10. So, don’t expect this broadcaster to run any hard-hitting documentaries against Crown’s Barangaroo project anytime soon! Very helpful, too, for capitalist billionaires are the “mates” connections that they develop with media moguls and media high-fliers. James Packer is very close friends with influential, right-wing 2GB shock-jock, Alan Jones, with the 45% owner of Macquarie Media Limited (which owns both 2GB and 2UE) John Singleton and with Lachlan Murdoch, a director of News Corporation (owner of The Australian and The Daily Telegraph newspapers, a host of regional and interstate papers and 50% of Foxtel) who is, of course, the son of its chairman and controlling shareholder, Rupert Murdoch. Then there are the myriad of connections arising from Packer and his father’s former ownership of Channel 9.

Such “mates” connections also cement ties between capitalist bigwigs and the politicians that administer their state. James Packer, for instance, is such close friends with former Liberal prime minister, John Howard, and ex-treasurer, Peter Costello, that they both, once again, attended his first wedding. Packer also played golf with Stephen Conroy when the latter was Communications Minister in the last ALP federal government. Packer is good mates too with Bob Katter and former Victorian premier, Jeff Kennett. Meanwhile, recent ex-Trade Minister, Andrew Robb, had worked for Packer’s PBL company from 1997-2001. What gives individual big capitalists political clout is not only their personal wealth and connections but their control of large chunks of the economy. Capitalist politicians and high-level bureaucrats are always on the lookout for lucrative positions in the private sector to move into once their careers in government or the public service are over. Thus, big business owners can lure these politicians and bureaucrats into doing their bidding precisely because these schmucks hope that this would open up a future career for them hired either directly as executives of or as consultants for their corporations (the way that former Labor powerbrokers Graham Richardson, Karl Bitar and Mark Arbib and prominent Liberal socialite, Ann Peacock, did in getting positions in Packer companies) or by other companies looking to establish links with these corporations. Even less cynical government politicians who actually believe (wrongly!) that they are to some degree representing the people are pulled into the orbit of those with considerable weight in the economy. For in an economic system dominated by private “enterprise,” they are reliant on these firms for providing jobs and for paying taxes into state coffers. The threat of big corporate bosses to withdraw from a major project can be enough to pull government politicians into line.

For those politicians and bureaucrats that still refuse to bow down to a big capitalist’s interests, the latter have nastier means at their disposal. Just as tycoons can build up a loyal politician’s or bureaucrat’s career, the way that the Pratt family industrial capitalists – who are currently second on Australia’s rich list – were the benefactors ensuring ALP Opposition Leader Bill Shorten’s rise (the late Richard Pratt used to let Shorten use his extravagant mansion for fundraising events when Shorten first campaigned for a parliamentary seat and even made his private jet available for Shorten’s use), they can also leverage their wealth to topple the careers of those who are not loyal enough. Look, for instance, at what happened to former ALP prime minister Kevin Rudd in mid-2010. Now, Rudd was an ardent supporter of the capitalist order and, thus, hardly one to make a strong stand against capitalist bigwigs. However, in 2010 he was planning to implement a Resources Super Profits Tax that would have mildly increased the amounts of tax that big mining bosses pay. That was too much for mining tycoons like Gina Rinehart, Andrew Forrest and Clive Palmer who are not prepared to share even a fraction of their fortunes with anyone. They – and other mining capitalists – went on a massive advertising campaign against the tax that saw them spend $22 million in just six weeks. Meanwhile, their friends in the Murdoch and other media outlets backed the campaign against the new tax. All this contributed to a steep fall in popularity for Rudd and enabled his internal ALP rivals to replace him as prime minister. Dancing completely to the tune of Australia’s mining billionaires, the new Gillard government then immediately watered down the tax to such a great degree that it hardly collected any money at all! Of course, the mining tycoons’ opposition to the Resource Super Profits Tax was not the only reason that Rudd was toppled. Rudd is an arrogant individual and was not liked much by his fellow ALP politicians. However, the decisive factor in his demise then was the slump in his opinion poll numbers caused by the massive advertising and media campaign against the Resources Super Profits Tax – a campaign conducted at the behest of the filthy rich mining bosses. The Packers, too, are well aware of the power that they have to bring down politicians or top-level public servants who, even in the slightest, get in their way. And they’re quite prepared to use it! In 1993 when James Packer and his late father, Kerry, first put in a bid for a Sydney casino, James Packer famously rang a Minister in the then NSW Liberal government and said: “the old man told me to ring… this is the message: If we don’t win the casino, you guys are f_cked”.

The truth is that in capitalist “democracies” the much vaunted principle of “one person, one vote” is a farce. For it is the small number of ultra-rich capitalists who have the wealth, control of the economy and connections to influence decision making and shape mainstream public opinion. James Packer with his $5 billion fortune seems to have more influence than at least half of the 5 million or so registered voters in NSW combined. So $5 billion is equal to at least 2.5 million votes. On average that means: two billion dollars = one million votes. Now that’s much more like the true equation describing capitalist “democracy.”

To be sure, the capitalist state does not serve one particular bourgeois capitalist. Rather, in the words of the Communist Manifesto: “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” However, the relative weight of a handful of tycoons in Australia is so great that the state almost always backs their particular interests.

Save Millers Point Public Housing!
Defend China’s Crackdown on Packer’s Greedy Executives!

Sydney, 19 March 2016: Opponents of the sell-off of public housing in the inner-city Millers Point area, including members of the MUA, CFMEU and ETU trade unions, march in protest. China’s arrest of 18 wealthy executives of James Packer’s Crown empire, including three Australian high-fliers, could undermine Packer’s Barangaroo Casino plan – thus aiding the campaign to save public housing in the Millers Point and Rocks area.

So Packer certainly had more than enough influence to instigate a sell-off of public housing in Millers Point if he wanted to. Would he want to? Yes would be a very good bet on the right answer to that question. Clearing out Miller’s Point public housing would allow the area to be turned into luxury dwellings that can be used by his casino patrons looking for longer-stay, nearby accommodation outside the hotel and for his executives overseeing the casino/hotel complex. All that would help with Packer’s project. Furthermore, even if a re-developed Millers Point site ends up not being directly used, in its majority, by patrons and executives of Crown’s Barangaroo complex, the planned complex is nevertheless driving wealthy speculators to try and grab hold of this land. Such speculators have no doubt been lobbying the government for the sell-off of public housing in the area too. The boost in property prices driven by Packer’s Barangaroo project also gives the NSW government itself more incentive to sell-off the Millers Point public housing as it means they can get higher prices at auctions than they otherwise would.

However, if the Peoples Republic of China follows through with its crackdown on Crown’s efforts to lure high rollers and other wealthy Chinese to deposit money in Crown casinos then the whole game would change. Packer’s Barangaroo project could be pushed into deep water. And if part of the economic forces that are driving the government’s sell-off of Millers Point public housing are stopped then the government will be more prepared to back down if faced with significant opposition from our side. That is why it is in the interest of the fight for public housing that we stand by the PRC’s crackdown. Furthermore, although we do not favour bans on gambling in Australia, it can only be a good thing more generally if Packer’s Barangaroo project goes splat. The whole philosophy behind the project is offensive to us egalitarians: that is, that scenic, beautiful-looking public space could be turned into a members only, high-rollers casino that only the very wealthy can afford to join and a six-star hotel that only the rich can afford to stay in.

Whether the PRC follows through and prosecutes the rich Crown executives is still a live bet. You can certainly bet that James Packer would be using his economic and political muscle to push the Australian government into pressuring the PRC state as relentlessly as possible. However, the determination of PRC authorities to crack down on Crown’s activities was shown when the suspects were first detained. They were detained in meticulously planned and coordinated overnight raids in several cities. PRC authorities also carefully waited for a time when Crown’s Australian-based VIP international boss, Jason O’Connor, was on a trip to China to launch the raids. Under China’s legal system, suspects are first detained and questioned and then only after lengthy investigation formally arrested if police believe that there is strong evidence of wrong-doing. The fact that the three Australian crown executives were formally arrested today – five weeks after being initially detained – show that Chinese authorities believe that there is clear evidence that they have committed illegal acts.

In standing by the PRC’s crackdown on Packer’s seemingly illegal actions in China, we should be ready for a barrage of condemnation of the crackdown from the big business-owned Australian media and ruling class politicians. That’s what happened the last time the PRC prosecuted corruption from a major Australia-owned multinational. In 2009, China arrested several high-flying executives from part-Australian owned, mining giant Rio Tinto for corrupt activities. Some of these corrupt activities involved making bribes to get PRC state-owned steel companies to pay higher prices for Rio’s iron ore than they would otherwise have paid. Especially as the trial of the Rio Tinto executives took place, then Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, National Party heavy and now deputy PM Barnaby Joyce and the mainstream media hysterically denounced the PRC’s legal procedures. It did little good. The PRC ended up handing the senior Rio executives lengthy jail sentences – including ten years for Australian Stern Hu. Rio Tinto like BHP, Packer’s Crown, Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue may be above the law here. However, in Red China, where enterprises under socialistic state ownership play the dominant role in the economy rather than corporations owned by tycoons, the state does not in general kowtow to the demands of capitalist bigwigs.

One of the things that the Australian mainstream media and politicians may throw out to defend Packer’s arrested henchmen is the claim that the arrests are arbitrary and over the top. However, it has now emerged that PRC authorities actually issued a stern warning to Crown last year that it was engaging in illegal activities. Australian Crown bosses then responded by trying to fly under the radar of PRC authorities by making short business trips to China instead of spending long stays there. They also started formally marketing their casinos to Chinese people as trips to “resorts” rather than casinos as a way to try and deceive PRC authorities.

Another bit of propaganda that Australian media and politicians may assert in support of Packer is the notion that Crown and Australians have been unfairly singled out by Chinese authorities. However, the PRC has already targeted other overseas casino operators. Last year, thirteen executives of two South Korean casino operators, Paradise and Grand Korea, were jailed for similar crimes to what the arrested Crown executives are apparently alleged to be involved in. Meanwhile, in a massive raid a few months ago, police in the south east Chinese province of Guangdong arrested almost 800 local people for economic crimes including “organizing illegal gambling activities overseas.” Furthermore, in the actual Crown arrests, alongside the three Australian nationals, one Malaysian national and 14 local Chinese nationals were also arrested. Furthermore, eight other Chinese people not working for Crown, some of them likely high rollers, were also detained in the October raids.

If the Australian mainstream media try to give the impression that only overseas businesses and their employees have been targeted in China that too can be easily re-butted. These Crown arrests are, in fact, part of a massive anti-corruption campaign that has been running in China for over two years. Although in some cases there is suspicion that Chinese president Xi Jinping has used the campaign to undermine factional rivals within the Communist Party of China, the campaign has truly clamped down on corruption. Hundreds of high-ranking politicians and businessmen have been prosecuted. Furthermore, perhaps the best aspect of the anti-corruption campaign is that it has to some, albeit small, degree also drifted into a campaign against the opulence of the rich. Thus, in early 2014, Communist Party of China authorities in major Chinese cities ordered the closure of high-end clubs and expensive restaurants near public parks, scenic spots and cultural sites because these venues could not be accessible and affordable to the masses. It is worth noting here that Sydney’s Barangaroo area is definitely such a scenic spot. In other words, if PRC law were applied here, there would be no Crown Barangroo project (even without the casino)! By the way, in the PRC’s anti-opulence drive, those formerly high-end clubs and restaurants located near public spots that were allowed to stay open were ordered to lower their prices and change their menus to turn them into places affordable to the masses. So, if the PRC law were applied here, Packer at best would see his Barangaroo project being turned into a centre with free entry nightclubs serving cheap drinks, affordable buffet restaurants for the masses enjoying the waterside parks and a three-star hotel providing clean and cheap accommodation for working class tourists from Australia, China and other Asian and overseas countries looking for an affordable place to stay in the heart of the city.

Perhaps the most likely argument that the Australian ruling class and its media will use to oppose any PRC prosecution of Packer’s henchmen is to claim that the PRC’s legal system is “cruel” and “harsh.” However, actually, Australia’s rate of imprisonment is nearly 30% higher than China’s. What is true is that the PRC does jail business tycoons at a much higher rate than Australia. So the difference between Australia’s current legal system and the PRC’s is a matter of who is targeted by the state. In Australia, the state jails disproportionately target Aboriginal people, people from Middle Eastern and Asian derived ethnic communities and the poor. In contrast, in the PRC workers state – despite suffering from plenty of bureaucratic deformations and the distortions caused by capitalist intrusion – it is wealthy private sector businessmen and the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats who are bribed by them who are disproportionately jailed. Australia’s capitalist ruling class, of course, finds such a system “harsh” and “cruel.” However, from the point of view of the working classes of both China and Australia such a system is exactly what is needed. We should defend it! And we should defend the crackdown on Packer’s and his executives’ illegal activities in China. Let’s weaken the economic forces driving the push out of public housing tenants from Millers Point! Stop the social cleansing of working class people from Sydney CBD! It is rail workers, bus drivers, ferry drivers and their ground staff, cleaners, warehouse workers, chefs, liquor and hospitality workers, construction workers, maintenance workers, fire brigade employees, ambulance staff, sales assistants, IT support staff and other workers who together make the Sydney CBD run. Yet the overwhelming majority of these workers cannot afford to live in the area. Let’s turn this around! Let’s turn the public space that was seized for Packer’s Barangaroo project into a big public housing block for working class people! Let’s fight for a massive increase in public housing throughout Australia! Fittingly, that is exactly what the PRC is doing – having provided around 40 million new public housing dwellings over the last six years.

China’s crackdown on Crown is not only good for the Millers Point public housing struggle, it is also more broadly in the interests of the working class. James Packer is such a powerful – and in Australia seemingly untouchable – capitalist that many here are resigned to him getting his way on everything. The fact that his executives could be called to account in the Peoples Republic of China should be used to give Australian workers confidence that the filthy rich bosses of this and other corporate giants are not invincible. Every fighter against oppression and every Australian trade union activist worth their salt ought to be seizing on this setback for Packer’s Crown to challenge, right here, the greedy exploitation by all the billionaires and the corporations that they own: including the likes of Crown, BHP, Rio Tinto, Visy, Seven West, Westfarmers, Woolworths and the banks. They should be saying to their proud and strong working class base: China is cracking down on corporate greed and corruption – we need to start to do that here too!

Public Housing, Unions

Still a Chance to Prevent the Destruction of Public Housing in Millers Point and The Rocks

May 21, 2017

Above, Sydney, 17 September 2016: Over 1,500 people including members of the CFMEU and MUA trade unions marched through Sydney’s Rocks area against the NSW government’s plans to demolish the inner city Sirius public housing block.

Expand the Union Action in Defence of Public Housing in Sirius:
Fight for a Massive Increase in Public Housing throughout the Country!

18 November 2016: Over the last two and a half years, officials of the conservative NSW state government have bullied and cajoled public housing tenants in the Sydney CBD’s Millers Point, Dawes Point and Rocks areas to vacate their homes and move to other locations. The Liberal-National government has already sold off many of these sites in auctions to private buyers. Many of the sites are being snapped up by capitalist developers planning to knock down the homes and build luxury dwellings in their place or to wealthy individuals seeking investment properties. The government’s argument is that selling off this public housing on prime land will provide the funds to enable them to build more public housing elsewhere. This is rubbish! The truth is that governments of all stripes – whether the Liberal-Nationals, the ALP or defacto ALP-Greens coalitions – at both federal and state level have been slashing public housing throughout the country over the last 15 years. Meanwhile, when residents are re-located from these city areas to other public housing dwellings, they are moved into homes that could have been allocated to some of the 60,000 families on NSW social housing waiting lists – not to mention the hundreds of thousands of others who actually need public housing. The truth is that the sell-off of public housing in the CBD is part of the government’s agenda to cut back public housing throughout the state and drive lower-income people from the city.

The NSW Liberal government’s agenda became even clearer at the start of this year when they announced their “social housing” scheme. This plan does not involve the building of additional public housing. Instead, over 1.1 billion dollars will be given to the private sector as subsidies to encourage them to deliver “social housing.” But this will not be the same as public housing. The private firms, since they are profit-driven, will prejudice against the most disadvantaged potential tenants since they are the least likely to be able to keep up with rents. The private operators will also be even more ruthless than the public housing authorities in refusing repairs and evicting tenants. Even when “social housing” is placed into the hands of “not for profit” private groups and operated as “community housing,” it will still be, in good part, operated in the way that profit-obsessed corporations would operate them since these operators are meant to “break even.” But social housing is not meant to be about “breaking even” – it should be about securing the right to housing for lower income people. Furthermore, some of these “not-for-profit” operators are churches which means they will have an inherent bias against prospective tenants who are either non-Christian or who do not lead what they deem to be “a Christian lifestyle” – for example, people from the LGBTI community, single mothers and unwed older women. These groups are already some of the most discriminated against groups in society. What’s more, in the NSW government’s plans, a large part of the public funds will now end up going as profit into the pockets of wealthy capitalist developers – funds that could have been used to build or acquire additional social housing dwellings.

The most harmful part of the NSW government’s plan announced in January 2016 is that 35% of public housing stock will be transferred to privately-run “community housing” operators over 10 years. The transfer of public housing into “community housing” is a big step towards the outright privatisation of public housing. Make no mistake about it: the government’s agenda is to privatise public housing. Their sell-off of public housing in the Waterloo, Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point areas is not about financing new public housing at all – it is part of an agenda to privatise public housing!

Although most tenants in Millers Points and the Rocks’ Sirius Building have already been pressured into re-locating, a hardcore of tenants are courageously staying put. Their stand is crucial because some developers are intent on putting up large scale, high-end commercial projects and that requires them to clear most of the space currently occupied by public housing dwellings. Thus, even a few tenants being able to hold out can stifle the plans of some of the greedy developers and their henchmen in government.

Through determined action there is still time to reverse the removal of public housing tenants from the Millers Point and Rocks public housing areas. We need to mobilise to literally stand by the side of those tenants resisting relocation as they face down further attempts to bully them into submission. When Department of Family and Community Services or Housing NSW officials arrange a visit to a dwelling to arm twist a tenant into relocating, trade unionists and other public housing activists should happen to be there visiting the tenant in large numbers at the time of the appointment. We can then throw the state’s intimidation back in their faces.

There is especially plenty of support for the struggle to keep the Sirius Building in the Rocks area for public housing. The Liberal government wants to evict all the tenants from Sirius to sell off the building to developers who will demolish the building in order to turn the space into luxury private apartments for the wealthy. Two months ago, over 1,500 people marched through the Rocks against the NSW government’s plans to sell off Sirius. Some of the speakers at the demonstration, including representatives of the MUA and CFMEU unions, rightly skewered the government’s plans as a “social cleansing” attempt to drive low income people out of the city and make it an exclusive preserve for the wealthy. Most importantly, coinciding with the protest rally, the CFMEU construction workers union and Unions NSW imposed a ban on any union members being involved in the state government’s plan to knock down the Sirius public housing building. Should any demolition work be attempted, unions could establish a picket line to block it. This struggle has the force of history behind it. The Sirius building was constructed in the 1970s to allow working class people in the city displaced by major construction to be able to continue to live in the area. It came as an indirect result of “Green Bans” imposed by the militant Builders Labourers Federation trade union, in part, to stop those demolitions and development that hurt working class people.

The ban imposed by the CFMEU and Unions NSW is a powerful boost to the campaign to stop the sell-off of public housing in the CBD. However, a weakness of the “Green Ban” put on the Sirius Building was the way it was motivated. In part, it was motivated absolutely correctly by unions. As CFMEU president, Rita Malia, explained:

The removal of residents from Millers Point to make way for the city’s elite shows us what will happen if Sirius falls.

The top end of town will move in and working people will be moved out, putting multibillion-dollar projects ahead of green spaces and affordable housing. We can’t let that happen.

However, the laudable union action was not explicitly motivated as part of a campaign to increase the amount of public housing more generally – i.e. statewide and nationwide. If our unions did take a militant pro-working class line and proudly declared that their Sirius ban not only aims to save public housing in the CBD but is part of a struggle to win a massive increase in public housing everywhere and to defend all the services that working class people need the most, their action would win excited support from other public housing tenants facing eviction, from the hundreds of thousands of people on the social housing waiting list, from the millions more in dire need of low-rent housing and from other working class people who are concerned about the lack of resources for public health care, public education and publicly provided childcare. This would also build additional, reliable support for the CFMEU amongst working class people which is so crucial at a time when the ruling class and its government are set to unleash a head-on assault on the union. However, pro-ALP union officials hope, instead, to make the Sirius campaign more powerful by uniting with Labor and Greens politicians and Sydney Lord Mayor, Clover Moore. Labor and Greens politicians do want some proportion of working class people to be able to live in the city but do not necessarily in the least support a massive increase in public housing – indeed, the ALP and Greens oversaw a slashing of public housing when they were last in office together federally as well as when the ALP last administered NSW. Their outlook is largely shared by Clover Moore – notorious from a working class standpoint for her opposition to the 1991 NSW General Strike when she was in the state legislature and for her support for police repression against the 2011 anti-corporate Occupy Sydney protests. The base of support for Moore, who participated in the September protest against the sell-off of Sirius, are small-l liberal, upper middle class elements who find that having some amount of working class people (but really not too much or else their property prices may fall) residing in the city makes the Sydney CBD “quaint” and “vibrant.” To appeal to such elements and to architects and town planners, union leaders in part motivated the ban on work on the Sirius site as a “Green Ban” aimed at protecting the building’s historic “Brutalist” architecture style and its heritage value.

Now it is all well and good for architects and other upper middle-class elements to support the campaign but the problem is that by our side not explicitly locating the ban as part of a struggle to increase the amount of public housing more generally and by diluting the pro-working class content of the campaign with issues about architectural styles and the like, it allowed the Liberal government to posture, albeit shamelessly, as the defenders of social housing. Thus, the Liberal government is claiming that while it is interested in providing affordable housing for low-income people – and selling Sirius is, they say, part of a plan to build much more public housing places elsewhere – the opponents of the sell-off are more interested in architecture and heritage. This is, of course, the height of cynicism. This Liberal government has been, from Wollongong to Waterloo, selling off public housing left, right and centre. That is part of their anti-working class, privatisation agenda. Furthermore, the resources for public housing should not have to come from selling off other public housing. After all, when the government wants to put resources into things it is committed to, like the police – who the ruling class needs to enforce its dominance over the working class – they don’t get it by selling off other assets in that sector. No, they take it from consolidated revenue! Public housing, as an essential need for the working class, should be funded out of consolidated government revenue which, in its turn, ought to be boosted by grabbing bundles of the exorbitant wealth that business tycoons rake in from exploiting workers. Nevertheless, despite the despicable dishonesty of the NSW government, the fact remains that because the campaign to save Sirius has (in deference to ALP and Greens politicians) avoided branding the movement as part of a struggle to increase public housing statewide and nationwide and because it has played up the architecture, heritage and city “vibrancy” aspects of the issue (in deference to the Greens and Clover Moore and her liberal, upper middle class base), the Liberal government has been able to thus far isolate the campaign from the many people seeking public housing statewide and from public housing tenants elsewhere facing forced relocation. We need to turn this around! It is working class people who will be the decisive and reliable support in the struggle for public housing not upper-middle class liberals and flaky, “progressive,” pro-capitalist politicians – who time and again have proved that when they have to choose between defending social services that working class people need and maintaining support from the capitalist big end of town they end up choosing the latter. Let’s unashamedly announce to all that the brave struggle to stop the sell-off of Sirius and of Millers Point public housing is a pro-working class campaign that is part of the fight to win a massive increase in public housing everywhere.

A home in the Millers Point public housing area with a protest sign. Although the NSW government has been able to intimidate most public housing tenants in Millers Point to leave, a determined hard core are refusing to leave, giving hope that the “social cleansing” of the area can be reversed.

This Struggle Can Still Be Won – Now is Not the Time for Despair!

With the government relentless in its drive to clear out public housing from Millers Point, Dawes Point and the Rocks and with many tenants having already been arm twisted to move, some involved in the struggle are feeling resigned to defeat. Yesterday, the Save Our Sirius (SOS) coalition issued a press release proposing a compromise deal with the state government. Under the proposed arrangement, the building will be kept but the government will still be able to raise the money it said it needed for social housing elsewhere by selling 50 of the apartments to wealthy buyers and keeping just 29 for public housing. The Save Our Sirius group includes some of the tenants from Millers Point and Sirius who have been at the forefront of the proud struggle to stop the sell-offs as well as union leaders but is led by architects and dominated by ALP, Greens and mainstream independent politicians. One big problem with the proposal that SOS has put forward is that it accepts the government’s very false notions that it is selling the public housing in the area in order to fund social housing elsewhere and that the resources for social housing should come from such sell-offs rather than the overall budget. Now it is true that sometimes when our side is not strong enough we have to accept a compromise deal in a clash with the other side. However, we should not be the ones ceding positions before the struggle is over and we should definitely not be accepting the false arguments of the capitalist government as good coin. It appears that the compromise deal has been shaped by the proclivities of architects – some of whom are genuinely sympathetic to public housing but many of whom nevertheless place a higher priority on preserving Sirius’ architectural style than on defending public housing – and by mainstream politicians who, while opposed to a total sell-off of public housing in the CBD, have far from a firm commitment to increasing public housing. Indeed, in their reply to the NSW government’s budget last year, the ALP Opposition announced a plan to transfer all of NSW’s public housing to private, “community housing” operators. That’s three times more extreme than the privatisation that Liberals are undertaking!

It is especially wrong to make a concession to the government on Sirius – that would see nearly two-thirds of all public housing spots in the building gone – when the union bans on any work in the building are still in place. These union bans, if enforced and backed up by mass picket lines to stop any work by non-union labour at the site, are a game changer. If the CFMEU and Unions NSW leadership stick to their commitments and enforce the ban and mooted picket line – and pro-working class supporters of public housing and rank and file union members should be organised to agitate to ensure that this happens – then the state government is on the back foot. Now is definitely not the time to be ceding positions to them.

Sydney, 2016: From 60 to 100 people are forced to sleep rough at Belmore Park opposite Sydney’s Central Station. The slashing of public housing by federal and state Liberal-National, ALP and ALP-Greens governments alike has driven more and more people into homelessness.

Furthermore, the struggle to defend public housing in the Sydney CBD area unexpectedly received a major boost from an international factor last month. This is connected with the six-star hotel and high-roller casino that billionaire James Packer’s Crown Group is establishing in the area. The complex will be located not more than, literally, two stone-throws away from the public housing being knocked down in Millers Point. Several of the Millers Point tenants who have spearheaded the struggle to defend public housing believe that Packer’s casino/luxury hotel is part of what is driving the government’s relentless campaign to boot out public housing residents from Millers Point. This sounds more than plausible. Packer would, no doubt, like the current Miller’s Point public housing area to be turned into luxury dwellings that can be used by his casino patrons looking for longer-stay, nearby accommodation outside the hotel and for his executives overseeing the casino/hotel complex. Furthermore, even if a re-developed Millers Point site ends up not being directly used, in its majority, by patrons and executives of Crown’s Barangaroo complex, its planned presence is nevertheless driving wealthy speculators yearning to grab hold of this land. However, last month all of this was put in doubt when the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) detained 18 executives of Packer’s Crown empire for breaking PRC law. The rich executives are suspected of illegally organizing tours and money transfers for high rollers from China to gamble in Crown’s overseas casinos – including, naturally, Australian ones. Gambling is banned in mainland China and PRC authorities are especially keen to stop local rich individuals from being enticed to gamble abroad. They understand that depositing money in overseas casino accounts becomes a means for the wealthy to circumvent the socialistic PRC’s strict capital controls and allows corrupt officials and businessmen to launder money abroad. Among the high-flying Crown executives that the PRC has arrested are at least three Australian ones including Crown’s boss of VIP operations, Jason O’Connor. James Packer has expressed “deep concern” for his arrested executives. However, what Packer is most worried about is that the PRC crackdown threatens to hit his Barangaroo business model for six. You see, although the proportion of high rollers in China is not especially high – indeed their proportion is tiny – China has such a huge population (60 times that of Australia) that these high rollers are numerically still a big number. Furthermore, since gambling is banned in mainland China and PRC authorities have been cracking down on wealthy mainlanders travelling to Macao to gamble, Packer was counting on luring Chinese high rollers to Barangaroo as a significant component of the revenue source for his casino. The PRC government’s repression of his illegal attempts to do this is widely believed to threaten the economic viability of his whole Barangaroo plan. Indeed following the PRC’s arrests, a whole one billion dollars was magnificently belted off the value of Crown shares. As the headline of an article in The Sydney Morning Herald (18 October 2016) put it: “James Packer’s Barangaroo could be the world’s tallest white elephant.” And if that did occur that would only be good news for the struggle to save public housing in Millers Point and the Sydney CBD more generally. For if part of the economic forces that are driving the government’s sell-off of Millers Point public housing are stopped, then the government will be less unwilling to back down if faced with significant opposition from our side.

Buoyed by Red China’s crackdown on Crown’s greed and knowing that we have the power of a union ban backing us, working class supporters of public housing must energetically support the struggle to defend public housing in the Millers Point, Dawes Point and Rocks area. We also need to reorient the campaign onto a path that places all our trust in the united power of working class people and our allies and does not, at all, rely on Labor and Greens politicians or subordinate ourselves to the agenda of upper-middle class elements and the small-l liberal politicians that serve them. That means we must do the following:

Push for the CFMEU and Unions NSW to repeatedly restate in public their union ban on any work to demolish the Sirius site. This will make sure that the government, developers and wealthy property investors get the message. It will also give our side confidence that our union leaders will not back down from the ban. Our union leaders must also announce unambiguously that should any contractor try to do work on the site with non-union labour they will be stopped by a mass union picket line.
Call for the union ban and promised picket on the Sirius site to be extended to include the stopping of any demolition of public housing at Millers Point and any re-development of sold-off public housing sites.
Support the PRC’s crackdown on Packer’s high flying executives. We should say: China is cracking down on corporate greed – it’s about time that it starts to happen here too!
Stand by those brave tenants still refusing to relocate! Organise delegations of trade unionists and other public housing activists to happen to be present when government officials make a scheduled visit to a dwelling. Don’t let these bureaucrats arm twist isolated tenants into relocating!
Again organise protest pickets at auctions selling-off public housing dwellings as well as broader actions in defence of public housing.
Insist that funding for public housing should come not from selling off other public housing assets but from the government’s general budget. The latter should in turn be boosted by grabbing chunks off the fat profits of capitalist exploiters and property speculators.
Clearly locate the inspirational struggle to defend public housing in the Millers, Dawes Point and Rocks area as part of the fight to stop the sell-off of public housing everywhere (from the coast around Wollongong to Waterloo to Glebe) and to demand a massive increase in public housing. Furthermore, clearly outline that the struggle for public housing is part of the fight to win all the services that working class people need the most – from properly funded public health care and public schools to free childcare to free TAFE and university education – and part of the broader struggle of the working class against the exploiting class. In this way we can win broader support for protest actions. And if a picket line is erected to stop the demolition of the Sirius site, public housing tenants from throughout Sydney and Wollongong, people on the social housing waiting list, nurses and other hospital workers, teachers and other supporters of working class interests will flock to join CFMEU members on the picket line.