Photo Above: Who is Really Calling the Shots! Australia’s richest person, mining billionaire Gina Rinehart flanked by Scott Morrison and Donald Trump at a White House state dinner during Morrison’s trip to the U.S. in September 2019. As in the U.S., in Australia, governments and state institution serve the capitalist exploiting class. That is why even during the pandemic, Australia’s tycoons have become even richer at the expense of working class people.
Corporate Bosses Use Pandemic to
Increase Their Exploitation of Workers
The Ever Increasing Share of National Income That Is Being Plundered By the Capitalists
Force Companies to Increase Hiring at the Expense of Their Ever More Bloated Profits!
12 September 2020: Over the last several months, business owners have thrown hundreds of thousands of workers out of their jobs. Even the ballooning unemployment rate hides the true extent of job losses. Many workers have given up the search for work and are thus not counted as unemployed. A huge number of casual workers simply are not getting shifts anymore or barely more than a few hours of work every month. They may be officially counted as “employed” but they know what they are actually going through!
Yet business owners – from
the bigwigs of large corporations to smaller business bosses hiring just a few
workers – have been crying poor too. And the right-wing federal Coalition
government, the Coalition and ALP state governments and the mainstream media keep
on telling us that “we are all in this together” in terms of the current
economic pain. However, the hard facts revealed a couple of weeks ago by the
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) prove what many people already know: that
we are in fact not all in
this together. They show that while
total wages for the three months to the end of June plummeted by 3.3% [1], corporate profits have surged by a
staggering 15% in the very same period [2]. To give a sense of how big that
profit explosion is, consider this: if
corporate profits continue to skyrocket at the same compound rate every quarter
for the next three quarters as well, profits would have increased by 75% in
just one year!
Sure, the bosses of some sectors like tourism and
travel businesses are experiencing falling profits [2]. However, this is more
than made up for by the surge in profits in other sectors. For example, profits
in the construction sector surged by 54% in the June quarter [2]. And while some retail outlets are not doing
so well, others are making such a killing that total corporate retail profits
have skyrocketed by over 30% in just three months [2].
Yet, when the media report on the suffering caused by
the pandemic, they focus heavily on the challenges of business owners and very
little on the hardships of workers. The media and politicians especially like
to speak about the difficulties faced by small business owners. Yet while small
business owners of cafes, restaurants and motels have certainly been hard hit
by the economic crisis, the profit increases amongst small businesses in the
media, information and telecommunications sector, the construction industry,
mining and some parts of retail have been so
huge that the overall profits of unincorporated businesses – that is, overwhelmingly smaller businesses – have
risen by a solid 1.6% in just the months of April, May and June alone [3].
So how have business owners – especially those of bigger operations but to a lesser extent those of smaller ones too – managed to actually increase their profits when overall the economy is in the worst recession since the 1930s Great Depression? How are they able to reap in yet more spectacular profits when the overall income produced by the economy has crashed by 7% in just the three months to the end of June [4]? The capitalist business owners have achieved this by grabbing a still bigger share of national income at the expense of the wage workers who actually do the work. This is a proven by a very revealing figure detailed in the national accounts for the June 2020 quarter: the Unit Labour Cost. The Unit Labour Cost represents the average amount that bosses must outlay in wages and superannuation for each dollar of added value that workers produce [5]. In other words, the higher the Unit Labour Cost the less that workers are being exploited, while the lower the Unit Labour Cost, the more that workers are being ripped off. Well, that Unit Labour Cost crashed by nearly 10% in just the June quarter alone [6]! That means bosses have spectacularly increased their rate of exploitation of workers during the pandemic. One way they have done this is to use the cover of the pandemic to cut their workforce and force those still employed to toil even harder for the same pay. The greedy capitalist business owners know that many workers still in jobs are nervous about resisting bosses when they see so many of their colleagues being thrown out of work. In other cases, corporate bosses and smaller business owners alike have been slashing working conditions over the last few months. For example, they have been forcing workers to work shifts without paying them shift or weekend penalties. So much for “we are all in this together”!
Now, bosses want
to increase their rate of exploitation even more. They are demanding laws to
extend workplace “flexibility” arrangements that will enable them to more
broadly avoid paying shift rates. In the mouths of the capitalists, “workplace
flexibility” means the bosses forcing workers to work in whatever arrangement
that is most profitable for the capitalists and workers not organizing
collectively to resist. The Liberal/National government is pushing this agenda
aggressively. They have insisted that firms eligible for JobKeeper be able to
unilaterally impose changes on employees’ work hours,
duties or work location. With typical spinelessness, the ALP “opposition” is, for
the most part, going along with the “flexibility” push. Even the ALP-dominated
leadership of the ACTU trade union federation has said that it is in principle
willing to negotiate on issues of “flexibility.” The ranks of the workers
movement should revolt against their current leaders acquiescing to this
agenda! We must fight to stop the
rollbacks of workplace rights for workers! Stop any cuts to wage loadings for
shift work! For wage rises not wage cuts!
Let’s fight against unemployment by forcing the capitalist bosses to maintain
much larger workforces at the expense of their ever expanding profits!
The Ever Increasing Share of National Income That Is Being Plundered By the Capitalists
As the total output that the
economy is producing is plummeting during this recession and some smaller
businesses in certain sectors are indeed doing it hard, the capitalist
bigwigs have overall actually become richer because they are seizing a much
bigger proportion of the national income than they were previously. The pie
has become a lot smaller but the share of that pie that the capitalists have
grabbed for themselves is just getting so much larger. Therefore, there’s a lot
less pie – filled to the brim as it is with
the fruits of our working class labour –
left to be distributed among the millions of working class people.
That business profits have been rising at a much faster rate than wages is not something that started during the pandemic. It has been going on for several decades now. The ABS data for the June quarter gives us a sense of just how much workers are being denied the fruits of their own labour. They show that total profits for the period of all private sector businesses employing labour [7] – that is, excluding the genuinely self-employed sector – was a whopping $120.1 billion; of which $109.6 billion was extracted by corporations [8] and $10.5 billion from unincorporated businesses [9] (largely smaller businesses). In the same period, total wages across the private sector were $141.9 billion [10]. That means that on average in capitalist businesses – that is, those hiring labour – 54% of the value that has been added by the operation of the business goes to wages and salaries and 46% goes to the business owners as profits. That is despicably unfair! For one, workers far, far outnumber business owners. Moreover, it is workers who are doing the work that actually produces the output of an enterprise. After all, how much of the iron ore that makes multi-billion dollar profits for the likes of Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart has ever been dug up or transported or processed by any one of these tycoons? None at all! And how many of the cardboard boxes that makes Visy owner, Anthony Pratt, his fortune has he ever folded or contributed to their development, manufacture, storage or transport?
The breakdown in distribution of income in an average business of 54% to wages and salaries and 46% to profits does not tell the whole story. For the fat salaries and bonuses of CEOs, directors and other top executives are also classified in the ABS figures as “wages and salaries.” But these big bosses are invariably also part or full shareholders of the company or sometimes even the sole owners of an enterprise in the case of smaller businesses. Although these people are numerically few compared to workers, their salaries and bonuses are so bloated that they make up a significant portion of total wages and salaries. If we moved their salaries and bonuses into the profits side, we would find that the split in income distribution in an average business is pretty much 50% to the workers and 50% to the business owners (indeed, it may well be that the capitalist bosses are getting even more than 50%). That seems a lot for these already fat cats to sit on their lazy, exploiting behinds! Let’s ponder what this fact means for workers. Consider a worker, lucky to have a full-time job, who receives $50,000 per year in wages. On average that worker is actually adding $100,000 or more to the net revenue of the business – that is, to the enterprise’s revenue minus all the expenses including raw materials, stationary, electricity, transport etc. Yet of that $100,000 of value that the worker is adding to the business operation, she or he receives back just $50,000 in wages. The other $50,000 is stolen by the business owners! That is the level of capitalist exploitation going on every day in Australia right across the economy – from large corporations employing thousands of workers to smaller businesses hiring just a few.
The reality is that even before the pandemic hit, this rate of exploitation of workers had
been increasing remorselessly. Thus, for the
earliest date that ABS data is readily available, the March quarter of 2001,
the official breakdown – the real one as we have discussed is even less
favourable for workers – in average income
distribution in a business was 64% for wages and salaries and 36% for business
profits [7] [10]. Yet by just before the pandemic, at the end of the December
quarter of 2019, the average distribution in Australia’s private sector had
become just 58% for wages and salaries and 42% for profits. Now, in just six
months, the percentage of income going to wages and salaries has crashed by a
further 4%, while the proportion going to profits has surged by the same
amount.
It seems that the income of ultra-rich business owners
is set to rise even further at the expense of working class people. The
conservative Morrison government has flagged that it may accede to the demands
of business bigwigs and make yet another cut to company tax levels even as it
has disgustingly decreed that Jobseeker payments for unemployed people will be
slashed by $300 a fortnight from next month onwards. This must be resisted!
Yes, economic stimulus is needed but in a way that actually benefits the
masses. The working class and its allies should demand:
No income tax cuts for high income earners (that is, those on more than $250,000 per annum).
No corporate tax cuts. Greatly increase company tax rates instead to cover some of the ballooning debt.
No reduction in Jobseeker payments – increase them instead!
A massive increase in provision of low-rent public housing. With millions of working class people struggling to pay rent this is an urgently needed measure.
A huge increase in funding for aged care. For all this funding to go to publicly-owned aged care centres. Due to the greed of private aged care business owners, the profit-driven aged care sector has failed to ensure the safety of residents and aged care workers during the pandemic, leading to the horrific, unnecessary deaths of hundreds of people. The aged care sector must be nationalized. The present employment of aged care workers on insecure casual terms should be replaced by their employment on a permanent, secure basis. For the number of aged care workers to be greatly increased and for public resources to be devoted to the systematic training of all aged care workers.
Free 24 hour childcare and free pre-school education accessible to all infants. This is vitally necessary to enable women’s full participation in economic, political and community life. All the funding should go to publicly owned childcare centres and pre-schools – the childcare sector must be nationalized.
Force Companies to Increase Hiring at the Expense of Their Ever More Bloated Profits!
Other than through more intensively exploiting their
workers, there is another reason why capitalist business owners have overall
been able to greatly increase their profits during the pandemic. Though the government’s JobKeeper program, in the context of a social order where bosses
are able to retrench workers at will, has helped some workers remain in
employment, overwhelmingly the main beneficiaries of the program have been
business owners. And this was always the government’s intention! In our
leaflet, No Job Cuts! No Unpaid Stand
Downs! that was written more than 4 months ago, in the early days of JobKeeper, we warned of this massive problem with the
scheme:
“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.”
With the ABS figures showing that corporate profits
have skyrocketed by 15% in the June quarter alone, the above prediction has now
been confirmed.
Yet given that capitalists are, currently, completely
free to throw workers out of their jobs at any time if that is what it takes to
maximize these bosses’ bottom line, what should
then be our attitude to JobKeeper? Well, it means that while fighting to impose a program for jobs
that will consistently benefit working class people and that can truly get rid
of unemployment, we should in the
interim insist on the maintenance of JobKeeper,
demand its extension to cover the millions of workers not presently included in
the scheme – including all casual workers, visa workers and international
students – and oppose the Morrison government’s plan to reduce JobKeeper payments from the end of September
onwards. The ALP and ACTU oppose the Morrison government’s plan to slash the
level of JobKeeper payments and to
the extent that they are actually standing by that position that stance should
be supported. However, overwhelmingly,
the main game should not be about JobKeeper
but about fighting for a class struggle program to end unemployment. And
here the ALP and the current pro-ALP leadership of most of our unions have
nothing at all to offer. Indeed, the ALP is so intent on ensuring their own
acceptance by the powerful big end of town – and even more so under “left”
current ALP leader, Anthony Albanese, than under the openly
right faction former head, Bill Shorten – that
they cannot even moot a scheme that would reduce unemployment at the expense of
business profits.
When one realizes that for every $100,000 of value added by a worker, on average about $50,000 is extracted by Australia’s capitalists, then it is very obvious what we need to do to fight unemployment: we need to force those capitalists to divert some of that money that they are grabbing from their workers as profits – perhaps to use to buy their third Mercedes, their eighth holiday home or their second luxury yacht – and use it instead to hire more workers. Capitalist business owners seek not to maximize production but rather to operate at that certain level of production with a certain size workforce that will produce the maximum profits for them. The reason that they don’t want to have a still bigger workforce producing more goods or services is that once that “optimum” level (for them) is reached any further increase in workforce would actually lead to a drop in their profits; for one, because they would need to reduce the price too much to sell the extra goods or services that the additional workers are producing, secondly because they may need to pay higher wages when there is less unemployment and thirdly because they would need to spend more on training as they start to hire less trained workers. However, if we could compel the business bosses to hire more workers, they would be forced to increase production of goods or services to make use of those extra workers and then have to lower the cost of the produced items in order to sell them all. So we would end up with an economy with more workers employed, more goods and services produced and lower prices – all of which would be great for the working class masses but which would be achieved at the expense of capitalist profits. Consider, for example, how this would work with the supermarkets – and we know that the filthy rich owners of Coles and Woolworths have continued to rake in fabulous profits during the pandemic [11]. If these bosses of the supermarket giants were forced to hire more workers and prevented from cutting any workers’ wages or conditions they would end up increasing opening hours to make use of the extra workers and probably increase the time spent on job training. Furthermore, so that they would gain some benefit in terms of total sales from having the extra staff, they would need to slightly lower prices to sell more goods and, thus, utilize the extra labour that they have been compelled to take on board. Moreover, to make use of the extra workers they would probably have more customers served by check out staff rather than self-serve counters. Apart from this being beneficial to the working class because more workers get employed, working class customers would also benefit through lower prices, faster and more convenient service and longer supermarket opening hours.
Of course, the
capitalist supermarket bosses would absolutely hate this as would any capitalist
being forced to employ more workers than they want to. They will scream blue
murder at the loss of profits. Meanwhile, Liberal, ALP and ALP/Greens governments, who all ultimately serve the
capitalists, will also militantly oppose such demands. That is why the only way
that we can compel the bosses to hire more workers at the expense of their
profits is through determined mass struggle. We need such powerful working
class action that the capitalists and the governments that serve them will
realise that the cost of not acceding to our demands is potentially greater and
more threatening to their overall domination of society than the loss of
profits that would ensue from meeting our demands. Even during a pandemic,
powerful working class action is still possible. In July, five hundred workers organised
by the National Union of Workers at Woolworths’ warehouse in Wyong, NSW took
powerful strike action to demand decent pay. The striking workers, who also established
a picket line to enforce the strike, additionally demanded the conversion of
long-term casuals to permanency.
In order to unite workers across different workplaces
into a common fight for jobs for all and in order to ensure that the rights of
workers at smaller businesses – where industrial action is less effective – are
also protected, we should fight for actual laws that force bosses to increase
the number of workers that they employ. Among the demands that we should fight
for are:
A ban on all job cuts
or unpaid stand downs by any firm making a profit, however small.
A ban on all job cuts
or unpaid stand downs by any company whose highest paid executive or director
has an annual salary and bonus package in excess of $1 million.
A ban on job cuts or
unpaid stand downs by any business whose total profit over the previous, say
seven, years exceeds any current losses.
The forcing of any
company still making a profit to increase its number of full-time paid
employees by at least twenty-five workers for every one million dollars of quarterly
(i.e. three monthly) profit. By the way, since total profits of private sector
businesses utilizing hired labour was more than $120 billion in the last
quarter, this measure alone would immediately lead to an extra three million
full-time jobs.
A ban on all cuts to
wages and workplace conditions from pre-pandemic levels.
The immediate
conversion of all casual workers into permanent employees with all the rights
of permanency.
Any business that
violates any of these measures to be confiscated and transferred into public
ownership.
To such a
program, the capitalist exploiters and all the ruling class politicians,
mainstream media commentators, “experts” and official economists who serve them
will scream that this is “totally impractical”, “will cause investment to
collapse”, “will lead to a plummeting of business confidence” etc etc etc. When they do, all socialists should use that
opportunity to explain to the working class masses that this is precisely why
we socialists insist that the means of production be stripped away from the
rich capitalists and brought into public ownership under a workers government.
For if the capitalists insist that plainly rational measures to ensure that every
worker gets a permanent, secure job is “not practical” and “will cause
investment to collapse” under their system, then this is the best proof one can get that their system needs to be swept away once and for all by the workers and all our allies and
replaced by a socialist system that we can truly call
our own.
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 losseshere 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!
Corporate
Bosses Endanger Workers’ Lives
Even More During COVID-19 Epidemic
4 April 2020: The greed of capitalist bosses knows no bounds. They have always stolen the fruit of workers’ labour. And in their drive for still higher profits, they have always been willing to endanger workers’ lives by cutting corners on workplace safety. Now, since the COVID-19 outbreak, the cruelty of their drive for profits has reached new levels. On the one hand, many business owners, at the first sign of a decrease in revenue or the need to temporarily shut down for quarantine reasons, are throwing out of their jobs the very workers whose manual and mental labour made these bosses their fortunes. On the other hand, some of those workers still in work are being exposed to the COVID-19 virus due to the bosses’ callous disregard for workers’ well-being. The latter is what is taking place, for example, at the Hutchison port at Sydney’s Port Botany.
We received the following message tonight from a
waterfront worker at Hutchison who is also a Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) member:
“COVID-19 outbreak at my work. Hutchison terminal in Sydney again stands still. This time due to COVID-19 where there is one confirmed case – not contracted in the terminal. Problem is the six shifts since March 24 prior to our [MUA] member being notified by NSW Health. The numbers exposed are greater than the company is revealing.
“Hutchison deliberately concealed a positive COVID-19 test from workers and the Union [MUA]. Then they had wharfies working ensuring the ship got away before revealing on April 3.
“Believe it or not Hutchison will still not reveal to the workforce or Union who was on shift and who crossed over the six shifts.
“The terminal remains shut down until workers are satisfied all safety concerns have been agreed and implemented.
“These people are beyond belief.
“It’s criminal behaviour that puts the whole community at risk.”
Victory to the stop-work action of Hutchison workers! Solidarity with
the endangered Hutchison workers!
Hutchison was started by British capitalists in the 19th century after Britain stole Hong Kong from China through the Opium War. In 1979, still during the period of British colonial rule, Hong Kong real estate tycoon Li Ka-shing took a decisive stake in Hutchison, then called Hutchison Whampoa. Today Li and his sons run Hutchison. Li has an estimated wealth of $A52 billion. Not surprisingly then, this capitalist has given tacit support to the pro-colonial, anticommunist opposition movement in Hong Kong. This movement expresses the interests of Hong Kong’s rich who know that their selfish interests will be harmed if socialistic China exerts more control over Hong Kong. A prominent leader of Hong Kong’s biggest trade union federation, the pro-Beijing Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions, aptly referred to Li Ka-shing as the “king of cockroaches” (see: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests-tycoons-li-exclusiv/exclusive-in-face-of-criticism-hong-kong-tycoon-li-ka-shing-says-hes-getting-used-to-punches-idUSKBN1Y11KW). We say that Red China should confiscate Hutchison and the other holdings of this king of cockroaches as well as those of the other Hong Kong tycoons and bring them all into public ownership so that the benefits of the socialist system can be brought to the people of Hong Kong; and improvements can be made to the conditions of workers employed in Hutchison Port operations around the world.
Unfortunately, the disregard for workers’ health shown by the bosses at Sydney’s Hutchison Ports is just one example of the attitude of greedy capitalists throughout Australia to the dangers to workers posed by COVID-19. In this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, working class people and our union movement will need to fight extra hard to stop layoffs, to prevent the bosses eroding our working conditions and to protect our very lives.
Photo Above: The government’s planned attacks on unemployed workers and other welfare recipients will lead to still more homelessness in Australia.
STOP GREEDY BOSSES FROM SLASHING JOBS!
DEFEAT THE MORRISON REGIME’S WAR AGAINST WELFARE RECIPIENTS!
16 October 2019 – The right-wing Morrison government is waging a multi-pronged attack on Australia’s lowest income people. Having rejected widespread calls to boost the cruelly low, Newstart Allowance, the Liberal-National government is seeking to push through legislation that will extend beyond June 2020 the trials of the Cashless Debit Card. Under the harsh regime of this “cashless welfare” system, welfare recipients will only receive 20% of their income through their bank account. The remainder must be spent through a Cashless Debit Card which can only be used at shops with Eftpos machines and cannot be used to withdraw cash or for alcohol or gambling. The government’s legislation will not only extend the period of the cashless welfare trials in the existing four sites but expand the trials to two new areas: the Northern Territory and the Cape York Peninsula. Welfare recipients in those two areas were already under compulsory income management as a result of the racist Intervention into Aboriginal communities begun in 2007 under the Howard government and extended under the following Labor government. However, the new measure will see the system where 50% of people’s income was restricted under a Basics Card replaced by the even more severe Cashless Debit Card, where 80% of income is quarantined. Moreover, if the new legislation becomes law, a minister will have the power to arbitrarily increase people’s rate of quarantining to 100%!
It is pretty
clear that the government’s aim is to use the trials as a stepping
stone to impose cashless
welfare on most welfare recipients. Last month, the junior partner
in the governing Coalition, the Nationals, decided
to push for the Cashless
Debit Card to be imposed on
all people who are unemployed or receiving parenting payments and aged under
35. For his part, prime minister Scott Morrison openly stated that the cashless
welfare trials were “commending itself for wider application.”
In yet another scheme to subject economically vulnerable people to more indignities, the Coalition government wants to drug test people receiving either the Newstart Allowance or the Youth Allowance. The measure will be introduced first as a trial at three sites involving 5,000 people. The bill enshrining the scheme is now before the Senate. Those who refuse to be drug tested will have their payments cut off and those that fail a second test will have to pay for the test, which would amount to hundreds of dollars. The scheme is so draconian and punitive that almost all health and drug treatment experts have slammed the plan.
All these proposed measures are not about supposedly using “tough love” to help unemployed people as the government claims. Rather, they will make the lives of low-income people more miserable. For starters, with welfare recipients often having to sub-let from a better-off tenant in order to be able to get rental accommodation (since landlords are reluctant to let to the lowest income people), cashless welfare will mean that many will simply not be able to pay their rent. Moreover, by curbing a person’s use of cash, the Cashless Debit Card will restrict low-income people from buying items at markets or second-hand from other people. They will also no longer be able to get a tradie to do a job at reduced rates for cash. Yet it is precisely the economically poor who most need to be able to get good deals from cash payments and bargains from markets and second-hand purchases. In short, the imposition of cashless welfare amounts to a sizable cut to the income of unemployed workers. How are people going to afford that when the Newstart Allowance is already so meagre? Take a single person trying to live in the working class Sydney suburb of Auburn, about 35 minutes from the city. The cheapest shared accommodation, single bedroom advertised there is going for $200 a week – that is, $400 a fortnight. Yet Newstart for a single person is just $559 a fortnight and the maximum rental assistance is only $138 per fortnight. So that single, unemployed worker has just $297 per fortnight left after paying rent. How the hell can a person survive on just $148.50 per week? Already many on Newstart are forced to skip meals, avoid using the heater during even freezing winter days and pass over purchases of essential medicines. Now, being denied the discounts that are possible through cash transactions will drive them further into poverty. And low income people face a second blow. With Liberal and ALP state governments alike continuing to sell off public housing, private landlords will know that they can jack up rents since people will have nowhere else to go.
What these planned new welfare measures aim to do is to stigmatise unemployed workers and all the poor – portraying them as lazy, drug or alcohol-addicted people who need a firm hand to bring them into line and make them job ready. This is a disgusting slander! The reason that so many people do not have jobs and many, many more have less work hours than they want is because of the greed of the corporate bigwigs who are forever trying to boost profits by slashing their workforces and driving those left behind harder for the same pay. Greedy business owners are, meanwhile, reluctant to spend any resources on training new workers unless there is big money to be made out of it. It is because of this capitalist system, where every economic decision is determined by the drive for profits for rich bosses, that there are nearly five unemployed people for every available job. Even if those small percentage of unemployed workers who have become, understandably, despondent at their prospects of finding work are pushed into becoming more active in job hunting this will only mean that instead of 19 people on average applying for each job vacancy, as is currently the case, there maybe say 23 people on average competing for each vacancy (even whether this will occur is questionable since the unbearably low level of the Newstart payment and greater costs inherent with cashless welfare will mean that people often cannot afford to buy clothes for interviews, travel to job opportunities or print their own CVs). Thus, at most, government “tough love” measures will mean that different people will end up getting the same scarce jobs. The same overall number of people will still be unemployed!
What the government’s schemes to stigmatise welfare recipients will do is to severely demoralise unemployed workers and lower their self esteem. When a worker gets retrenched by a boss or a young person struggles to get their first, secure job they feel demoralised because humans by nature want to be able to utilise their skills and as social animals we long to contribute to society’s development. Part of the egalitarian culture of so-called hunter-gatherer societies of the past came from the fact that everyone was able to contribute to satisfying their clan’s needs and those contributions were valued by and, indeed, essential to all. Yet in the profit-obsessed, capitalist system so many people are cruelly denied the basic human need to be able to utilise one’s labour and contribute to social production. These victims of capitalist greed then have to also put up with being vilified by the tabloid press, right-wing TV commentators and radio shock jocks and being looked down upon by a society whose values are shaped by the corporate ruling class. And ever more and more, these people are being stigmatised by punitive government policies like cashless welfare and mandatory drug testing. Meanwhile, the economic hardships imposed on welfare recipients through below poverty-level payments – increasingly compounded by restrictions on their access to cash – lead to social isolation as people can’t afford to travel to social events, pay entry fees to shows or nightspots or even go out for a coffee. So, unemployed workers are pushed into depression. Quite understandably, some in this predicament will seek solace in various forms of escape from reality – whether that be in the illusory salvation of religion or other cults or the “alternate reality” of a drug high.
But any suggestion that it is the lowest income people
who are especially prone to drug use or
alcoholism is repugnant. Welfare recipients
simply don’t have the money to be buying large amounts of drugs or alcohol. It
is the cocaine snorting, chardonnay swilling corporate high fliers, managers,
barristers, yuppies, rich kids and the like living in places like Bellevue
Hill, Mosman and Vaucluse who get to
indulge and spend far more on drugs and alcohol.
Of course, the government is not
suggesting compulsory drug testing of these social classes – after all, these
are the very people whom their regime serves!
In this soulless, dog-eat-dog capitalist society, many people from all classes seek
various forms of escape from reality. And as with plunging into religion or
cults, using drugs to escape – especially when it results in actual addiction –
can often make reality even worse than it currently is. Yet for some of those being isolated and stigmatised at the bottom of this ruthless, class-divided society,
having a means of “escape” is what stands between
them and deep depression or even suicide. What these people need is not
punitive drug testing – and being made to pay for the exorbitant costs of these
tests – but an end to the stigmatisation, a system that provides guaranteed
jobs for all and something else that definitely does not exist now: widely
available and free addiction treatment, counselling and mental health services.
Ironically, contrary to its claimed goals, the government’s policies, by
further stigmatising welfare recipients will drive more people into seeking to
escape reality through drugs, alcohol or religion (the bible-thumping members
in the regime like Morrison, Eric Abetz and Christian fundamentalist Andrew
Hastie would, of course, love the latter).
In their policies to punish the poor, the right-wing
government also imparts their own racial prejudice into the process. The
existing cashless welfare trial areas as well as the two new proposed sites
have a disproportionately high percentage of Aboriginal residents. Indeed, nearly
80% of people affected by the cashless
welfare trials are Aboriginal people. Notably too, one of the three
sites selected for the mandatory drug testing of welfare recipients is
southwest Sydney’s Canterbury-
Bankstown area, a region with a very high proportion of residents from various
Asian and Middle Eastern backgrounds. For a regime that oversees racist police
brutality against Aboriginal people and the stealing of Aboriginal children
from their families; and which regularly incites racist fears against one
minority community after another,
from Muslims, to African youth to Chinese
students, such discriminatory behaviour
is not surprisingly overtly racist.
Moreover, the racist,
rich people’s regime knows that racism is widespread in their society
and so think that trialling punitive measures in heavily Aboriginal or heavily
Asian/Middle Eastern regions will meet less resistance. Yet all working class people should know that repressive schemes
first unleashed against Aboriginal people are often later rolled out more
broadly. For example, compulsory work for the dole was first unfurled against Aboriginal people and then subsequently
rolled out against most long-term unemployed workers. And, of course, cashless
welfare itself began with the racist Intervention into NT Aboriginal communities.
RIGHT-WING GOVERNMENT: BASHES THE POOR, BASHES THE WORKERS MOVEMENT
So why are Scott Morrison and Co. on this crusade against welfare recipients apart from, of course, the fact that they are heartless, upper class snobs with contempt for the poor! For one, they want to cut spending on welfare. They hope that by punishing welfare recipients and increasing the number of reasons why a recipient will get their payments suspended, they can drive down budget outlays. That will allow them more funds to lower tax rates for their big end of town mates, give negative-gearing tax concessions to wealthy investors buying multiple properties and support the government’s increasingly large budget for spy agencies and for their military build up against socialistic China. Last year, Australia, a country with a relatively small population, was the second biggest arms importer in the world, spending more on weapons imports than China, a country with sixty times our population (see: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-30/australia-worlds- second-biggest-weapons-importer-behind-saudi/11558762)! The rich people’s regime’s annual defence budget is now $38.7 billion which, spread out and spent on welfare instead of war, would amount to about $52,000 per year for every person on the Newstart Allowance!
However, cutting costs
is not the government’s only motive. After all, the Cashless
Debit Card itself initially cost $10,000 per person per year to administer and
even the lowest estimates of this operating cost now stand at $2,000 per person
which amounts to about $40 per week that could, instead, be used to boost the
income of each welfare recipient!
A big part of the motive for the government’s war on welfare
recipients is to blame
unemployed workers for their own plight so that people will not focus on those
really responsible for joblessness – the corporate bigwigs who, after sweating
out millions and billions in profits from their employees, don’t hesitate to
throw some of these same workers out of their livelihoods whenever pruning
their workforce is what it takes to further boost profits. Thus, despite
extracting a whopping $1.2 billion profit out of its workers in just the first six months of this year, Telstra
bosses have thrown 3,200 workers out of a job since June last year as
part of a plan by this rich Australians-owned company to axe 18,000 workers by
the end of 2022. For its part, David Jones bosses are in the process of axing
120 jobs, including 28 jobs at its Wollongong store.
This despite the company’s rich shareholders making a $37 million profit last year and
over $200 million over the last three years. With
more than half of young adults without a permanent job and as the
capitalist world lurches into another economic downturn, the capitalists’ government is determined to ensure that
the masses don’t identify the greed of the owners of Telstra, David Jones, NAB and the other corporations as the reason
for rising unemployment.
And when the parties that uphold the capitalist order
aren’t blaming unemployed people for their
own plight they use nationalist and racist scapegoating instead. The
Liberal/Nationals specialise in blaming migrants and refugees for unemployment,
the ALP and Greens are focussed on blaming imported
products and guest workers
and the far-right outfits, like One Nation, rabidly do both.
Perhaps the main reason that the Morrison government wants to make life more miserable for welfare recipients is to help their rich business-owning mates by driving down the wages and conditions of employed workers. By keeping welfare payments so small and imposing such cruel restrictions on recipients, Morrison and Co. know that unemployed workers will become more willing to accept jobs with terrible wage rates and working conditions. Already there are hundreds of thousands of workers in Australia – disproportionately young or female or migrant toiling away for below award wages in sectors like retail, hospitality, aged care, warehousing and restaurants. Moreover, by making the conditions of life so terrible for those who lose their jobs, the anti-working class government hopes to intimidate existing workers into putting up with poor conditions and shying away from risking involvement in trade union struggles for rights at work. That is why the entire workers movement – and in particular our trade unions must champion the struggle to smash the Morrison government’s attacks on welfare recipients.
RELY ON WORKING CLASS POWER & OPPOSE THE AUSTRALIAN RICH PEOPLE’S REGIME’S ENTIRE AGENDA
No one should
be under the illusion that we can rely on parliamentary machinations to stop the current
offensive against welfare
recipients. The cross-bench politicians are anti-working class. Tasmanian senator Jacqui
Lambie, who may have the deciding vote in the Senate on the various government
bills, broadly supports cashless welfare. Under pressure from their working
class base, the ALP is now opposing the government’s legislation in its current
form. Yet working class activists
should not have faith that the ALP will spearhead a movement against the
government’s measures. Remember this is the same ALP that previously voted for cashless welfare trials and when
last in government implemented perhaps the cruellest of all welfare cuts: the
throwing of low-income single parents (mainly single mothers) and their
families off the parenting payment and onto the much lower paying Newstart
Allowance. Even today, the ALP’s opposition to cashless welfare is
hardly staunch. They plan to amend the government’s cashless welfare
legislation so that the scheme becomes voluntary. That is, of course, better
than being compulsory but that still means that they will be promoting the
despicable stigmatisation of unemployed people inherent in cashless welfare.
And that stigmatisation is, indeed, half of the government’s agenda!
Now the Greens have been stronger in their opposition to cashless welfare than the ALP. The problem, however, is that the Greens accept the current social order, reject the idea of workers organising as a class against it and, themselves, receive big donations from rich capitalist high-fliers. Yet it is only mass action of the working class against the capitalist class that can force the capitalist politicians to retreat from their current course. When we see such militant, mass action – backed by the power of the union movement – then suddenly some cross-benchers or even government politicians, realising the need for the class that they serve to make concessions, will miraculously “discover” the injustice of their war on welfare recipients. So let’s have mass working class struggle to demand a complete end to cashless welfare, a total rejection of drug testing of welfare recipients, a massive increase in public housing and a big increase in the Newstart Allowance. However, we should not stop there. We need to fight for the basic human right of all people, who are able to do so, to use their labour and talents to contribute to social production. That means launching industrial action struggles to stop all job slashing plans by business owners. It also means demanding laws stopping all profitable companies from cutting jobs and laws which force profitable businesses to increase hiring at the expense of their profits. And to truly enable working class mothers to fully participate in work life we need to fight for free around-the-clock childcare, free pre-school education and free school lunches at all schools. To all these measures, especially ones that force business owners to retain more staff than is optimal for their profits, the capitalists will scream that this is unaffordable and impractical. To this we must reply: if your system cannot even provide jobs for all and, thereby, also utilise every person’s skills and energy for society’s benefit then it is so cruel and so irrational that it has got to go. We working class people will take the banks, factories, mines, transport and communication systems, utilities and agricultural land into our own able collective hands and run a socialist system that will serve all working class people and all the poor.
To realise this perspective we need to turn around the program that currently dominates our unions. Most of our unions remain led by a pro-ALP agenda that, while critical of companies when they cut jobs, rarely takes any action against this except occasionally in the small minority of cases where job losses are related to companies moving operations offshore. Instead, the only “strategy” that pro-ALP union leaders have to win more jobs for workers is to make economic nationalist appeals to restrict imports, curb the entry of guest workers or favour local businesses. Yet, such protectionism never helps save any workers’ jobs as overseas countries will inevitably retaliate with their own measures against Australian producers. All such schemes end up doing is dividing Australian workers from our true allies – the workers of all countries – while bringing us into a bloc with the very people that we need to be struggling against: the job-slashing local bosses. So we need to replace this Laborite perspective
with one based on irreconcilable opposition to the local capitalist exploiting
class. We
need a union movement and a workers party that do not restrict
themselves to demands that are tolerated by the capitalists but which, instead,
unite the working
class to fight for what we and all
the downtrodden need. That means waging all out class struggle
– including in defiance of
anti-strike laws – to oppose job cuts by business owners, to smash the Morrison
government’s entire war on welfare recipients, to defeat its planned laws
making it easier to deregister militant unions and to force profitable companies
to increase hiring at the expense of their profits. Such a program is part
of a far-sighted perspective to win a future socialist society where it will be
the working class and poor – and not the cruel capitalist exploiters – who
will be the new ruling class of a fair and kind society and who, one day, will even abolish the very notion of a
society divided by classes and the systematic, unequal distribution of wealth.
Against the Right-Wing, Western-backed Protests in Hong Kong
Socialistic PRC Should Extradite Even More Tycoons to Face Justice on the Mainland and Have Their Ill-Gotten Assets Nationalised!
10 June 2019 – Australia’s big
business and government-owned media have been lionising the recent, often
violent, right-wing protests in Hong Kong. They report that driving the
protests are businessmen, shopkeepers, lawyers and university students. This is
a protest pushed by large sections of Hong Kong’s capitalist class, the upper
middle-class and younger wannabe capitalists. They fear that the socialistic state
ruling mainland China will gradually undermine their privileged position (see also
this letter by a comrade written some five years ago which dissected similar
anti-communist protests at the time: https://www.trotskyistplatform.com/greetings-for-the-october-1-anniversary-of-chinas-great-1949-revolution/).
The groups opposed to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) within Hong Kong are not only being encouraged by the mainstream Western media but are being funded by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (here the National Endowment for Democracy’s own website lists some of the anti-PRC programs that they openly fund in Hong Kong – one of which they deviously portray as being for workers rights – https://www.ned.org/region/asia/hong-kong-china-2018/ , however their covert funding is many times larger). They are also being filled with cash by Hong Kong’s own capitalist class and by capitalists in mainland China. A particular reason that capitalists are up in arms over Hong Kong’s proposed new extradition law – the object of yesterday’s protests – is that it will make it easier for the PRC to continue cracking down on mainland capitalists hiding out in Hong Kong. Although, unfortunately, the compromising Beijing leadership has allowed some people to become capitalist tycoons within China, the great thing is that the PRC often comes down hard upon these capitalists. While in Australia, the likes of James Packer, Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forest are above the law, the biggest tycoons in China are often nabbed for corruption. Moreover, if their rate of exploitation has become excessive, especially in a way that puts the broader economy at risk, the PRC authorities sometimes bow to public pressure and crackdown on these hated corporate bigwigs. Sometimes they even laudably confiscate the assets of these billionaires and bring them into public ownership – i.e. carry out the socialist program.
1 July 2019: Violent, pro-colonial protesters smash into Hong Kong’s legislative building and hoist the flag of the former British colonial regime that brutally occupied Hong Kong.
The particular incident that is driving Hong Kong’s capitalist elite and upper-middle class yuppies to oppose the planned new extradition law is the kidnapping two years ago of greedy Chinese billionaire Xiao Jianhua from a Hong Kong hotel by PRC authorities. That is why many of those involved in yesterday’s anti-PRC protests were carrying signs like: “no kidnapping to China.” PRC authorities ended up taking Xiao Jianhua to the mainland for questioning and detention. Xiao is now awaiting trial for corrupt activities. The PRC workers state has also taken over a bank that he owned, Baoshang Bank – one of the rare privately-owned banks in China – and given it over to state-owned banks to run. In other words, the bank has been effectively nationalised. This is fantastic! For more details on this nationalisation and the bringing down of Xiao Jianhua and other greedy billionaires in Hong Kong by Red China see the following mainstream media articles:
More Chinese capitalists hiding out in Hong Kong should be extradited and have their assets nationalised. Any real socialist would want this!
Moreover the PRC should abandon its deal with the British imperialists who stole Hong Kong in 1842. Britain seized Hong Kong after winning the Opium War against China. In winning that predatory war Britain’s capitalist rulers not only stole Hong Kong but won the “right” to turn half of China into drug addicts for the sake of their profits, the “right” to “concessions” granting them and other imperialist powers control of key parts of China and the right to control and plunder China’s markets. In the 1997 deal between China and Britain that finally returned Hong Kong to China, the PRC (wrongly) agreed to maintain Hong Kong’s capitalist system for at least 50 years. The deal meant “one country – two systems.”The PRC should renege on this deal – imperialist powers should have no right to dictate what system exists in any part of China or any other country for that matter. No more one country – two systems! It should be one country – one socialist system! That means that the assets of the Hong Kong capitalists should be confiscated and brought into public ownership. In particular, Hong Kong’s huge and vital port should be confiscated from notorious billionaire Li Ka-shing and his son, Victor Li. Li Ka-shing and Victor Li control Hutchison Port Holdings, which as well as owning Hong Kong’s ports also controls a port terminal at Sydney’s Port Botany, where they are notorious for union-busting attacks on workers jobs and working conditions (see: http://www.mua.org.au/mua_takes_hutchison_to_court_over_wharfie_sackings_hutch).
If the PRC puts Hong Kong’s capitalist bigwigs out of business, the social base for the right-wing anti-PRC movement will be greatly weakened. More importantly, nationalising the businesses owned by the Hong Kong tycoons will allow the wages and working conditions of workers in Hong Kong’s ports and service sectors to be greatly improved and will provide the resources to finally improve the atrocious living conditions of the hundreds of thousands of working-class Hong Kong residents either living in cage-like “homes” or tiny slum-like apartments. In other words a move to bring the socialistic system to Hong Kong would be popular amongst the working class and poor of Hong Kong. It would also illuminate – for all to see – the clear class question involved in the issue of support or opposition of PRC influence. It would become clearer to the working class masses of Hong Kong that their interests lie in being ever more closely a part of Red China. Moreover, a blow against the capitalists of Hong Kong would give confidence to those within the mainland seeking to preserve socialistic rule there. That struggle is a difficult and fraught struggle as the PRC workers state is facing aggressive pro-capitalist demands from Chinese private business owners, Western-backed “dissidents,” the imperialist rulers of Australia and the U.S. (the latter with its fervent demands during the trade disputes that China stop supporting the socialistic, state-owned enterprises that dominate her economy) and soft-on-capitalist elements within the Chinese leadership and bureaucracy itself.
Therefore anyone who supports working class people’s interests and
socialism should support increased PRC influence in Hong Kong, should unequivocally
oppose all anti-PRC movements there and should call for the PRC to bring Hong
Kong’s economy under socialist, public ownership.
17 August 2019: A spirited, 3000 strong pro-PRC demonstration gathers outside the Sydney Town Hall. The rally opposed the anti-PRC rioters in Hong Kong.
One of the Trotskyist Platform (TP) placards at the 17th August 2019 demonstration where over 3,000 people marched through the streets of Sydney in opposition to the pro-colonial rioters in Hong Kong who have been seeking to undermine the region’s incorporation into the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). The march was several times larger than even the biggest of the rallies held in Sydney supporting the right-wing, pro-colonial opposition in Hong Kong. This is despite those anti-PRC actions in Australia being massively supported and built up by the entire capitalist media.
Nearly all those participating in the 17th August march were international students from China or people from the local Chinese community. However, a multi-racial group of TP supporters also joined the pro-Red China march. As well as standing in solidarity with the action, our contingent opposed the Australian ruling class’ escalating Cold War repression of supporters of socialistic China as well as other socialistic states (such as the brave pro-North Korea political prisoner in Australia, Chan Han Choi) and emphasised that defending the PRC workers state is in the very interests of the working class and oppressed of this country. We also distributed a leaflet at the demonstration that not only opposed the anti-communist opposition in Hong Kong but called for socialistic rule to be brought to Hong Kong so that all of China can be in one country under one socialistic system.
No Parliamentary Party Is Offering Any Major Gains for the Most Exploited & Downtrodden Workers
8 March 2019 – Siva worked for ruthless bosses. The business owners at the warehouse where she was employed simply stole her wages. They insultingly paid her $11 an hour less than she was legally entitled to! Her story, which Siva told to a Queensland parliamentary inquiry, is far from unique. In some sectors like restaurants, cafes and beauty salons, bosses are more likely to pay workers below the legal minimum than they are to actually pay award wages.
Siva was a casual worker. Since bosses can sack casuals on the spot or simply not give them shifts if they complain, casual workers are often underpaid. Moreover, Siva is a woman in a society where, even as we mark International Women’s Day (IWD) in 2019, women continue to suffer gender oppression and much lower pay than men. Also, she is of Asian descent. Either because they are themselves prejudiced or because they know that racism and nationalism is so widespread – and thus that people of colour will be more isolated – bosses think that they can rip off workers of Aboriginal, Asian, African or Middle Eastern origin.
And then there is the all too legal mistreatment of casual workers. Many casuals have no certainty about the number of hours of work that they will get in any given week and can be called in to work at any time. A disproportionately high percentage of casual workers are women and young people. When one adds those employed through labour hire, the gig economy or short-term contracts and the still more who have not even been lucky enough to obtain any work, it’s clear that a large majority of young working class people in Australia do not have secure jobs! It’s not surprising that anxiety, depression and, most tragically, suicide amongst young people are so widespread!
The super-exploitation of casual workers and so many young and women workers hurts all of us workers! When workers are forced into jobs with poor conditions in some industries it allows bosses elsewhere to also chop away at working conditions. Under a capitalist, so-called democracy, no matter who wins an election, little will improve for working class people – and for working class women in particular. The Liberal-Nationals and the right-wing minor parties are, as always, trying to slash workers’ rights. The Labor Party does oppose the push of the conservatives to introduce a new category of “flexi-permanent” worker in order to expand casualisation. Yet the ALP’s agenda will largely maintain the status quo where workers’ wages are not keeping up with ever increasing prices even as the 200 richest people in Australia bolstered their wealth by a staggering $50 billion over the last year. The recent ALP conference refused to commit to an increase to the paltry Newstart Allowance for unemployed workers. The ALP has no policy to prevent bosses from hiring new workers as casuals. Indeed, the continued oppression of casuals and the expansion of short-term work have all occurred under the Fair Work Act regime brought in by the last ALP government and it was the earlier Hawke-Keating ALP administration that had overseen the near doubling of the rate of casualisation in the 1980s and early 1990s.
There is a time-honoured way that we can use to fight back against the undermining of workers’ rights. That is through industrial action and mass mobilisations. This is how workers, women and all oppressed groups have won whatever rights we still enjoy today. Earlier this decade, a union campaign of strikes and rallies by community sector workers won decent pay rises. This was a victory for gender equality too as the low pay of these workers was partly based on discrimination arising from these workers being mainly women. In the middle of last year, strike action by workers at an infrastructure firm, Downer, culminated in the unionised workers defeating the bosses’ attempts to impose yet another wage freeze. This proves that only determined and militant class struggle can bring about positive change!
Sydney, 1 May 2019: Thousands of construction and maritime workers down tools to join a workers rights march on May Day. The united working class have the power to smash the attacks of the capitalist bosses. However, for this power to be realised, the workers movement needs to be freed from the illusion that change can come through parliament and from the divisive poison of economic nationalism. Photo credit: NTEU
Unfortunately, many workers don’t work at larger sites with lots of fellow workers where it is easier to organise unions. Small businesses owners are often even more vicious than corporate bigwigs and are more likely to hire workers on an unpermanent basis. That is why we need to fight for laws to protect workers with an insecure employment status. We must demand laws that mandate that all workers be hired with the rights of permanent workers. All workers must also be granted a certain minimum number of hours of work per week. We must say no to gig economy-style employment! Those employed in the gig economy must immediately be transferred from being contractors to being permanent employees. They must start getting paid for the time they are on call and when they aren’t receiving “gigs”. Laws decreeing such measures would be a step forward but we would then still have to work out ways to enforce them. That is why we need to expand union membership. When our unions start taking militant action in workplaces where we workers are well organised then our fellow workers in smaller sites will be inspired to join our unions.
CLASS STRUGGLE & PROMOTING SALVATION THROUGH VOTING FOR THE ALP & THE GREENS ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE STRATEGIES
Though most groups on the Left would say that they agree with industrial action and mass struggle, nevertheless at the same time they promote support for the ALP and Greens – either through openly pushing for a vote for these parties or through calling to “put the Liberals last” at the upcoming elections. These left groups like Solidarity, Socialist Alliance, the Communist Party of Australia and Socialist Alternative would argue that they are simply employing a “diversity of tactics” in the struggle for workers’ rights. However, the more that workers believe that their salvation lies with an ALP or ALP/Greens government, the less they will be willing to take the risk of waging class struggle action. This is especially the case because laws restricting strike action have become so draconian that workers who think there is another easier sounding path will be reluctant to dare to engage in militant industrial action.
All this has been evident in the course of the ACTU leadership’s Change the Rules campaign. Now we certainly do need to “change the rules” which are stacked against our unions and severely restrict our right to strike. The ACTU’s campaign was meant to employ a “diversity of tactics” including stop-works, rallies and electioneering for the ALP. However, since it is a lot easier for the ACTU to electioneer than to wage industrial action, the campaign, especially as the elections have neared has become almost entirely a “Vote ALP/Greens” operation. In this light, it is evident too that the focus on “Changing the Rules” became an excuse to avoid unleashing the necessary struggles in defiance of the unjust anti-strike laws. This was dramatically seen in January last year when the leadership of the RTBU union, with the evident acceptance by ACTU leader Sally McManus, bowed to a Fair Work Commission ruling and called off a planned rail strike in Sydney. To be sure, a year earlier, McManus caused a stir when she rightly said that there is no problem with workers breaking laws when the laws are unjust. Yet, as we saw with the aborted Sydney rail strike, these have remained largely empty words. Industrial action is at an all-time low. That is why workers’ wages are so stagnant. And as the elections approach, even the ACTU tops’ talk of breaking unjust laws has evaporated along with the stop-work action component of the Change the Rules campaign.
The bankruptcy of this elections-based strategy is highlighted by the simple fact that the ALP does not even promise to get rid of the anti-strike laws. They even sanctified these very laws in their 2009 Fair Work Act. The left groups that are campaigning for the ALP and/or The Greens contend that they want to get these parties into government and then “hold them to account.” However, the problem is not mainly that the leaders of these parties need to be “held to account.” The issue is the very essence of their politics. In the face of a powerful, capitalist class with its massive wealth that it can use to fund political parties, its ownership of the media and its control of all state institutions, the ALP doesn’t seek to challenge the power of this ruling class but, instead, to get the little they can for workers that these capitalists will find tolerable to give. And this is not very much at all! In the wake of the late noughties’ Global Recession, what the insecure capitalists are willing to give is actually almost nothing! That is why the ALP has promised to maintain the Coalition’s tax cuts for companies with revenues up to $50 million a year. In other words, the ALP has agreed to give multi-millionaire business owners a huge bonus while taking away funds that could have been used for public hospitals or for restoring the parenting payment for low-income single mothers which the former ALP-Greens government so cruelly took away in 2012 (the same year that the then PM Julia Gillard gave her famous anti-misogynist speech!) The Greens do have some social policies that are more progressive than the ALP’s. Yet they do not believe that the working class ought to challenge capitalist power or even organise separately to the capitalists. That means that, ultimately, they must bend to the capitalists’ agenda on nearly all major issues. That is why when The Greens were in government in a coalition with the ALP in Tasmania from 2010 to 2014, they actually pushed for retail electricity privatisation.
Workers must refuse to support any of the pro-capitalist parties. Having been convinced that class struggle is the only road, the working class movement will be better prepared to fight against the attacks of whichever party is elected to administer a state that’s designed to always work in the interests of the big end of town. The struggle to bring this clarity to the working masses is part of the fight to bring a class struggle program to the ascendancy within the working class. Such a program understands that building class struggle resistance requires bringing the working class together in the tightest possible unity. That means rejecting our current, pro-ALP union leaders’ divisive economic nationalist calls which set local workers in competition against our international and guest worker sisters and brothers. We must actively oppose nationalist and racist divisions. We must mobilise the union movement to fight to free the refugees, to demand the rights of citizenship for all visiting and guest workers and to build genuine unity with trade unions right across the world. Unlike the ALP’s strategy, the class struggle program that we must fight for is based not on what the capitalists can tolerate but what we and our fellow working class sisters and brothers need. That means demanding permanency for all workers who are currently employed as casuals or as pseudo-contractors in the gig economy. It means fighting to force profitable companies to, at the expense of their profits, increase hiring. It means fighting for free, around the clock, childcare! For equal pay for equal work! Of course, in the face of a powerful movement making such demands, the capitalist exploiters will yell, “we can’t afford this, the economy will collapse.” To this a class struggle leadership of the working class, that is a revolutionary socialist party, would respond: If you can’t run the economy in a way that gives secure jobs to all and enables women to have the complete economic independence they need to maximise their participation in society and enable them to more easily dump violent and abusive men, then you do not deserve to have ownership over the economy. We will take it from your greedy, miserly and clumsy hands. Under the watchful eye of our sovereign Aboriginal sisters and brothers, the workplaces and industries of this country will thrive under the public ownership and the collective control of a socialist workers government.
1 August 2018 – Socialist political prisoner Chan Han Choi continues to languish in an Australian prison camp. He has been locked up in harsh conditions now for well over seven months and has been denied the most basic rights.
Chan Han Choi was arrested late last year due to his sympathy for socialistic North Korea. He was accused of trying to help the people of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK – “North Korea”) by facilitating the sale of their produce abroad in violation of United Nations sanctions. However Chan Han Choi maintains his innocence despite pressure from both the authorities and his previous legal teams to “plead guilty” or accept a plea bargain. Indeed, given the racist and pro-capitalist bias of Australia’s legal system we wouldn’t be surprised if Chan Han Choi is simply being persecuted because he is an outspoken supporter of North Korea who has friendly relations with DPRK officials.
Yet, even if the claims against him turn out to be partially or fully true, he is no criminal from the standpoint of the working class. Quite the opposite! In that case, Chan Han Choi was simply trying to help people being ground down and potentially starved by some of the most severe sanctions ever imposed on any country. Similar sanctions imposed on Iraq caused the deaths of over 500,000 babies in just the first eight years of their implementation. Although the DPRK’s socialistic system has enabled her to cushion her people from such catastrophic consequences, the cruel sanctions still cause much hardship to the people of North Korea.
Moreover, if the allegations against Chan Han Choi are in any way true then he has even more boldly than thought stood by a socialistic state. Although the North Korean government does have certain flawed policies, the fact remains that the North Korean masses have built a workers state founded on the overthrow of greedy landlords, bankers and factory bosses. In standing by a workers state that the imperialist powers are trying to grind down into submission, Chan Han Choi is like a proud trade unionist defending a strike on a picket line. He is standing not only by the workers involved in the immediate struggle but by workers everywhere. In supporting the DPRK workers state, Chan Han Choi is also standing by the interests of the working class in Australia and the entire world. The workers movement and all genuine socialists in Australia must now stand by him and demand his immediate freedom.
Chan Han Choi is an avowed socialist, who is conscious about the cruel racist oppression of Aboriginal people in Australia. He rightly believes that there are no real, human rights in this country. Indeed his own persecution is living proof of his views. The authorities are trying to avoid having his trial in open court but are rather pushing for a closed court trial with no public and media present. Why does the truth exposed to open light scare them so much? Indeed Australia’s ruling class is so determined to isolate and dehumanise this socialist political prisoner that media shots of him have blurred his face and for the first several months he did not even appear on video link at his own court mentions. Not only has he been denied bail but he earlier went through a roughly 50 day-period where his lawyer was denied access to him. Moreover, Australia’s racist, rich people’s regime has made it almost impossible for family and friends to visit Chan Han Choi. Indeed, prior to two friends visiting him this month, he received no visits whatsoever for the previous five months. The two that did visit him incredibly had to wait over four months to get their visit approved! Indeed, even his son has been barred from visiting him. Meanwhile, when Chan Han Choi’s wife speaks to him by telephone they are forced to speak in English despite both of them being far from fluent in English. The authorities openly admit that this is to enable them to listen in on his calls. However it is clearly also yet another attempt to break his spirit. When he or his wife inadvertently break into Korean during a phone conversation, the authorities immediate cut the call. If all that is not enough, the authorities have moved this socialist political prisoner into the hospital section of a jail. Why? Because they have deemed his defiance and his sympathy for socialistic North Korea as a symptom of “mental illness”!
The denial of basic rights to Chan Han Choi comes in the context of a growing crackdown on the right to dissent in Australia. New laws purportedly targeting “foreign interference” provide pretexts for regime crackdowns on protest movements and even media reporting. Furthermore, at the start of this month, the NSW provincial government’s Crown Land Management Act came into effect which gives low-ranking bureaucrats broad powers to disperse or ban protests and meetings on any state-owned land. Most importantly, nationwide anti-strike laws and draconian laws targeting construction workers have curtailed the right to strike and led to legal proceedings against over a hundred trade unionists in the construction industry. Now the federal government has introduced the Defence Amendment Bill 2018, which if passed into law will make it easier for the authorities to call out the army against protests and strikes.
The persecution of Chan Han Choi is part of the drive of the Australian and U.S. regimes to strangle the socialistic DPRK. Although North Korea’s successful development of a nuclear deterrence finally forced the U.S. government to accept peace talks, the capitalist rulers of the U.S. and Australia remain determined to overturn socialistic rule in North Korea just as they remain hell bent on destroying every other state where the working class rules – however tenuously and imperfectly – whether that be in the Peoples Republic of China or in Cuba.
Chan Han Choi’s imprisonment for allegedly trying to help North Korea avoid the UN sanctions focuses attention on these cruel sanctions – which are aimed at starving the North Korean masses into submission. They want the North Korean masses to meekly stand by and accept a pro-Western takeover and capitalist conquest. Alongside calling for the immediate dropping of all charges against Chan Han Choi, the workers movement and all genuine socialists in Australia must demand the immediate lifting of all sanctions against North Korea. Let’s stand by working class interests by standing by the DPRK workers state and its brave supporter Chan Han Choi! No to the criminalisation of leftist dissent in Australia!
Fortunately as the persecution of Chan Han Choi continues, the campaign to support him is also gathering steam. We will shortly announce details of a protest rally in Sydney. In the meantime, we are asking all supporters of the socialistic DPRK and of the interests of the working class and oppressed – both in Australia and internationally – to print out t-shirts with the image in the attached PDF image (click this link to get to access this PDF file: Choi reverse for light or white t-shirts). You need to get the image, which is a reverse, printed onto a t-shirt transfer (for light-coloured/white t-shirts) from your file at a print store. Then once the transfer is printed you have to iron it on to the t-shirt. The shirt will look similar to the attached image below.
Supporters and friends of ours, please contact us if you want us to send you already made t-shirts. We will only be too happy to help as long as you promise to occasionally wear the shirts at leftist and union rallies and meetings.
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!
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!
Trotskyist Platform Placard that reads ” Stop the privatisation of public housing! Stop the attacks on services working class people need”.
Picture of public housing protest occupation in defiance of the capitalist 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.
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”.
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 Windowsto Evict a Public Housing Tenant but the Powerful Union-ledStruggleAgainstSocial“Cleansing”inSydneyCityisFarfromOver
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: enoughis 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. TheywantPetertoliveina rough shed hundreds and hundreds of kilometres fromhisworkplace! 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, farfromover. 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,rightandcentre! 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 ALPgovernmentuptoMarch2011andthe Liberal-National coalition since then – have slashedthe 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 onebigfatlie. Indeed, if anything, the reduction in public housing across Sydney seems to be accelerating. A report in the TheSydneyMorningHerald (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. Whatgovernmentshavebeen doing, while claiming that theyarecommittedtomaintaininga level of “social housing”, is to convert public housing into “communityhousing.”This is a large stride towards the full privatisation of public housingandisa 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 workingclassAuburnandrelyingona single full-time worker on the minimum wage would have topayoverhalf of their after tax income on rent to live in a two bedroom unit if they wereabletoaccessoneofthese 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. NotoprivatisationofSydneybuses– No to privatisationofpublichousing!
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, wemustnottailorourstruggles just to try andwin 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 onthestreets 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.”
– TheSydneyMorningHerald, 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.
