Now Make Abortion Truly Free, Accessible and Fully on Demand
After Decades of Struggle, Abortion Decriminalised in NSW
2 October 2019 – Today, a law came into force decriminalising abortion in NSW. This is a significant victory for women, the working class movement and everyone who cares about social justice. It is a product of a decades-long struggle by abortion rights activists and supporters of women’s rights.
Supporters of women’s right to decide what happens to their
own bodies, which is what the right to abortion means, participated in a mass
campaign to support the legislation decriminalising abortion. However the
legislation had a rocky passage through parliament as hard right Liberal Party
parliamentarians and other socially conservative politicians tried every means
possible to block and weaken the legislation. Meanwhile, conservative activists
and politicians like Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott furiously agitated on the
streets in large protests against women’s right to choose. The anti-abortion
forces succeeded in pushing through some harmful amendments but were not able
to kill the essence of the new law.
Among the amendments passed to the original legislation is
one that makes it mandatory for a women seeking an abortion after 22 weeks into
a pregnancy to get approval from at least two medical practitioners. This could
be mean that women seeking late-term abortions could be subjected to a grilling
by doctors or to a, often humiliating, counselling session. The decision to
seek an abortion can be an emotional decision for a women. To add extra hurdles
to the process simply adds stress and anguish to the women concerned who will often
already have to put up with puritanical objections and stigma from backward
family members, friends and work colleagues. Therefore, we demand that all hurdles on women seeking abortion be removed. Women
must have the right to abortion completely on demand!The right-wing opponents of women’s right to choose must be resisted!
Abortion has been technically illegal in NSW since 1900.
However, doctors have been performing abortions in NSW to some degree since the
1970s onwards. They have done so under the cover of a 1971 court decision that
abortion is not unlawful if a doctor finds it “necessary to preserve the women
involved from serious danger to their life, or physical or mental health.” Yet while
abortion remained a crime under the NSW Crimes Act any right to it remained
very tenuous and subject to being swept away all together by any reactionary
swing in social climate. Doctors knew this which is why in conservative rural
areas, most doctors were reluctant to perform abortions. Hence rural women,
especially lower income women who could not easily afford travel to the city,
found it very difficult to access abortion. Moreover, many public hospitals,
even in cities, did not provide abortion procedures and those that did often
listed it as a non-routine service. As a result, any right to abortion that did
exist was often expensive.
The coming into force of today’s Abortion Law Reform Act
will make more doctors willing to perform abortion services and thus will make
abortion more accessible for women. However, there still needs to be a major struggle to ensure that the right to abortion
is actually accessible for working class and rural women. Many of the
abortion services are currently privately run and thus the procedure is often
out of reach of lower income women. Yet it is precisely lower-income women who
need the right to choose the most as a women’s decision to have an abortion can
often be an economic decision – based on the reality that she may simply be
unable to adequately provide for and look after a child that she brings into
the world. Thus ensuring women’s true
right to choose means not only winning the right to abortion on demand but also
requires ensuring that the procedure is a free and widely available
service provided by the public health system; and it also means ensuring that
lower-income women are lifted out of poverty.
It is the task of the entire working class movement – in
which history has destined working class women to play the lead role – to fight
to ensure that abortion is both free and fully on demand and to champion the
broader struggle for women’s emancipation and social equality. As well as
standing for free abortion on demand, Trotskyist Platform fights for equal pay
for equal work, guaranteed permanent jobs for all and free around the clock
childcare. We also stand for a system that will provide free pre-school
education, free school lunches at all schools and after-school sports, music
and cultural activities provided for free by the state alongside free transport
from school to and from these activities. The struggle to realise and provide
the resources for all these measures poses the need to strip the economy away
from the filthy rich capitalist exploiters and place it into public ownership
under a workers government.
MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE SYDNEY STABBING ATTACK AND THE NEW COLD WAR AGAINST RED CHINA
22 August 2019 – A day cannot go by without the Australian ruling class ratcheting up its Cold War against socialistic China. Today, the right-wing NSW government expelled the China-connected Chinese language institute, the Confucius Institutes program, from teaching at NSW schools. The decision was welcomed by ruling class politicians of all stripes. Rabid anti-China Greens MP, David Shoebridge, hailed the decision saying: “I am glad to see the department is cancelling this arrangement, it is unfortunate they can’t cancel it immediately.”
But perhaps the biggest indication of how rabid the Cold War witch-hunt of supporters of Red China is becoming can be seen in the media coverage of a seemingly unrelated event: last week’s stabbing rampage in the centre of Sydney. We know that a 24 year-old woman was stabbed to death by the attacker and a 41 year-old woman was injured after being stabbed in the back. The name of the young woman who was killed is Michaela Dunn. A former student at the University of Notre Dame, Michaela loved to travel the world. We express our deepest sympathies to her friends and family. Her mother described her as a “beautiful, loving woman.” She was much loved by her friends too who described her as “incredible”, a “true delight” and a “bright young woman.” Outrageously, much of the media only focused on Michaela’s occupation as a sex worker rather than as a whole person – thus adding to the widespread stigmatisation and dehumanising of women who work as sex workers.
But what of the woman who was stabbed but not killed? Media footage showed the woman as she was about to be taken away in an ambulance. It was apparent that she was a woman of East Asian background. However, the media revealed almost nothing about her. Later they said that her name was Linda Bo. What the mainstream Australian media hid from the public is that Linda Bo is a Chinese national – that is, a person not only of Chinese ethnicity but a citizen of the PRC (Peoples Republic of China).
This was definitely not just an oversight by the media. In dealing with other crimes they invariably report if either the suspects or the victims are nationals of another country. Moreover, Chinese state media within hours published that the Consulate General of China in Sydney confirmed that the woman who was injured in the attack was a Chinese national (see for example: http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-08/13/c_138306442.htm). And we know that the Australian mainstream media assiduously follow official Chinese media if only to disparage it.
So why did Australia’s capitalist media hide from the public that one of the stabbing victims was a Chinese national? Because to do so would have humanised people from the PRC! As part of whipping up hostility against socialistic China, the Australian government and big business media portray citizens of the PRC as brainwashed, interfering, undemocratic stooges of the Communist Party of China. To then report that a PRC citizen has been the victim of a prominent crime undermines that narrative as crime reporting so often emphasizes the common human interest aspect in stories about victims of crime (unless they happen to be sex workers!) and to portray a citizen of the PRC as a human being with family, friends, feelings and dreams just like everyone else doesn’t fit the picture of China that the mainstream media is now so focussed on drawing. The only PRC citizens who are treated like humans by the media are anti-communist activists who are, of course, lionised by the capitalist media as “brave fighters for democracy.”
It is not that there was any conspiracy involved here. The media did not all get together to secretly decide that they would not report that one of the stabbing victims was a PRC citizen. In fact, it was something even worse. All these mainstream media outlets, acting in the class interests of their capitalist owners, each independently decided to hide this fact from the Australian public. That’s how full on the Cold War campaign is against Red China and against anyone who supports – or does not oppose – it. In the face of this massive media propaganda campaign and the wide array of forces lined up behind the Cold War anti-PRC drive, those truly committed to the struggle for socialism must not flinch one bit. We must stand firm and not only take the correct position on paper in defence of the Chinese workers state (as weakened and deformed as it is by a degree of capitalist intrusion) but we need to actively fight for this line on the streets.
20 August 2019 – Today, NSW Liberal Premier Gladys Berejiklian delayed
for several weeks a bill in the Upper House that would have finally decriminalised
abortion in NSW after pressure from right-wing politicians. Following a decades
long struggle by abortion rights activists and supporters of women’s rights,
the NSW Lower House voted for the legislation. However, conservative activists
and politicians like Barnaby Joyce are furiously agitating on the streets in
large protests aimed at once again preventing women having the right to
abortion. This right amounts to the right of women to decide what happens to
their own bodies. Those opposed to women having this right are working to either
stifle the abortion decriminalisation bill or to add qualifications that would
restrict the right to choose. Already they have forced an amendment giving
doctors the power to push counselling upon women seeking abortion. Such
counselling can often be humiliating for the woman concerned and often makes,
what is often an emotional decision for a woman, much more painful.
We demand the dropping of all such qualifications and
restrictions on women’s right to choose. Abortion must be made legal and solely on
demand of the woman concerned. The right-wing opponents of
women’s right to choose must be resisted.
If abortion is decriminalised it will be an important victory. But there will still be a big problem. The procedure is often difficult to access especially for women in rural areas. Moreover, many of the abortion services are privately run and thus the procedure is often out of reach of lower income women. Yet it is precisely lower-income women who need the right to choose the most as a women’s decision to have an abortion can often be an economic decision – based on a reality that she may simply be unable to adequately provide for and look after a child that she brings into the world. Thus ensuring women’s true right to choose means not only ensuring the right to abortion free of qualifications but also means ensuring that the procedure is a free, safe and widely available service provided by the public health system; and means ensuring that lower-income women are lifted out of poverty.
It is the task of the entire
working class movement – in which history has destined working class women to
play the lead role – to fight for free abortion on demand and to champion the
broader struggle for women’s emancipation and social equality. As well as
standing for free abortion on demand, Trotskyist Platform fights for equal pay
for equal work, guaranteed permanent jobs for all and free around the clock
childcare. We also stand for a system that will provide free pre-school
education, free school lunches at all schools and after-school sports, music
and cultural activities provided for free by the state alongside free transport
from school to and from these activities. The struggle to realise and provide
the resources for all these measures poses the need to strip the economy away
from the filthy rich capitalist exploiters and place it into public ownership
under a workers government.
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.
Male Chauvinism Creeps into Every Corner of Capitalist Australian Society
HOW MISOGYNY CRUSHED THE CAREER OF A TALENTED WOMAN
Those serious about opposing the oppression of women are aware of the overall picture in Australia. How women are paid on average 23% less than men. How women’s right to abortion is at best tenuous, curtailed and under attack. How domestic violence, bullying and abuse of women is rife. Yet, the reality of women’s oppression in capitalist Australia is made up of millions of personal stories. Stories of subjugation, humiliations, abuse, received threats and dashed hopes.
Some women’s experiences are worse than others. A working class or other low-income woman tends to cop the worst of male chauvinism because her subordinated and vulnerable socio-economic position leaves her open to misogynist attacks from male bosses, landlords, welfare/ public housing bureaucrats, debt collectors and cops. If a low-income, working class woman is of a coloured “ethnic” background and even more so if she is Aboriginal, the racist oppression she can suffer only magnifies her subjugation as a woman and as a working class person. In contrast, women from rich ruling class and upper-middle class backgrounds, generally, have greater means to evade the full force of misogyny within society. This can sometimes apply, too, to others lucky enough to get a good education and have promising career prospects. Yet, even some of these women can be unfortunate enough to suffer cruel oppression. We present here the story of one highly educated, once theoretically “upwardly mobile,” professional woman whose career was crushed under the weight of Australia’s misogynist society. Her work life was turned from great hopes to torment and finally exclusion. This woman, “Rozita H” (not her real name), wants us to tell her story. We here oblige her wishes not only because she fully deserves to be able to air her sufferings but because her experiences help shine a light on the inner workings of this misogynist, capitalist society and the types of people who occupy the echelons of its “respected” classes.
Rozita was born in Iran and migrated to Australia in the 1980s in her late teens. She had wanted to get a high quality education and that time in Iran universities were closed. From watching movies during the era of the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran’s rule (which ended in 1979), she had thought that Western countries were places of “advanced science”, “freedom” and “democracy.” In time this would all prove to be a cruel illusion.
Rozita put herself through university in Australia, often working ten hour shifts in coffee shops and in aged care to gain the income needed to get by. She eventually graduated with an architecture degree from one of Sydney’s most prestigious universities. Rozita wanted to live the life of a skilled professional. Don’t get her wrong, she did not have ambitions of being a high-flying capitalist exploiter. Even from that age she was a leftist and, for instance, participated in protests against the first U.S./Australian war on the Iraqi people in 1990/91. However, what Rozita hoped for was an interesting, fulfilling and well-paying job as a professional woman. When you meet her you realise that she really has a lot going for her in addition to the potential benefits that a prestigious degree could be expected to bring her. Rozita is both technically and artistically talented, beautiful, bi-lingual and with an allround razor sharp mind. Theoretically, according to the if you are capable and work hard… principle that capitalist societies supposedly operate according to – the mythical “meritocracy” which even if it were real is still a flawed and anti-egalitarian principle – she was more than on her way to realising her dreams. Indeed, for a while it seemed to Rozita that she was on a pleasant path to success. After qualifying with her Architecture degree she found work in her field. Meanwhile, as she puts it, she enjoyed living the Bohemian inner city life of art and culture, following intellectual pursuits and socialising. However, before long, the reality of being a non-white woman in a racist and male chauvinist society started to come crashing down around her.
The fact that a misogynist who openly bragged about groping women could be elected U.S. president shows how much male chauvinist attitudes dominate capitalist societies. Trump’s election in turn serves to reinforce anti-women bigotry.
A WOMAN WHO DARED TO DEFY THE BOYS CLUB
Rozita’s first job was in the public sector. However, she soon found that her abilities were not recognised. It was a boys club running the show. Indeed, Rozita points out that, in her experience, having worked in several jobs in the architecture sector, only around 10% of architects are women and the directors and senior architects are always men.
Frustrated at the doors being shut in her face in her public sector role, Rozita moved to the private sector. This proved to be a case of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. She was simply not accepted into the workforce. Instead, at some workplaces, her bosses sent the message – slimily packaged in “coded” language to enable them to evade responsibility – that she needed to have sex with them if she was to get a foot up into real projects. Indeed, one male architect she once worked with explained the deal to her with brutally “honest” bigotry:
Men have designed, built and managed buildings and construction for over 5,000 years. What, do you think we are going to let girls in? We only let girls in to fu_k them!
Due to this misogynist pressure, Rozita moved jobs several times. She jumped from one “reputable” architecture firm to another but could not escape from a noxious male chauvinist environment. In one of the last firms that she worked at, the misogynist climate was especially severe. One of the directors of the firm was a big bully who she asked us to refer to as “Roy.” Roy’s stock in trade was screaming his head off at female employees. He and several other male architects in the firm also made unwanted, overbearing sexual advances at Rozita while being sly enough to cover themselves by thinly veiling their forays. From soon after she joined this firm, Roy made clear to Rozita – as he did to other female employees – that he owned her. His “justification” being, “I bring in millions of dollars to this firm so ….” On one occasion after word had got back to Roy that Rozita was seen at a nightclub dancing with a guy, Roy called in Rozita to tell her that he had heard this and then made clear that if she danced with another guy … she ought to submit to him!
Because she refused to succumb to the demands of her male bosses, Rozita was excluded from opportunities to use her architectural skills. Instead, she was given tedious draughting tasks that required her to work from 8am to 11pm, five days a week. Exhausted, Rozita told her “superiors” that she needed a break from that work and wanted the opportunity to get involved in an actual architecture project where she could utilise her training. The response from a male director was a series of clearly coded messages such as: “How about mixing business and pleasure?”
Rozita turned to the Human Resources Department hoping for some respite. She explained that she was being treated arrogantly and denied the opportunity to be involved in actual architectural projects and asked whether there was any problem with the quality of her work. The answer from the Human Resources Manager went something like this:
No, it has nothing to do with the work you are doing. Roy is very ambitious and if he does not get what he wants he will start screaming.
As Rozita puts it, the Human Resources Department acted as pimps for the firm’s directors. The Human Resources Manager was basically telling Rozita that she ought to submit to Roy saying that “Roy brings in millions of dollars to the firm and Roy always gets what he wants.” Eventually, Rozita ended up in a situation where she was not only discriminated against and harassed but felt physically threatened. Roy put her on practically meaningless tasks that required her to repeatedly stay back working late. He then, himself, hung around after work doing almost nothing except to invade Rozita’s personal space and slouch around in sexually suggestive postures. Knowing how aggressively and abusively Roy had behaved towards her and other female employees, Rozita feared that Roy would one day rape her. She had to get out! And she did.
Rozita is rightly proud that she always maintained her dignity and refused to submit to the pressure of her despicable male chauvinist “superiors”. She points out that several other female employees at various firms that she worked at did succumb to the wishes of their male bosses – although Rozita does not judge them. She, herself, has had to pay a heavy price for maintaining her integrity and standing by her principles. The architecture world is dominated by an elite clique of male mates. If word gets out that you are a woman who refuses to play the game and what’s more has the audacity to defy the big boys then doors are literally shut in your face. As a result, Rozita has been excluded from work in her field. It has been thirteen years since she has had a secure job in the architecture sector. This has been wholly demoralising. It also means that she does it really hard financially. The whole experience has taken a huge financial and emotional toll on Rozita. Fortunately, because of her considerable artistic talents she is able to fall back on art as a pursuit. Others not so lucky to have been endowed with her talents would have found it much harder to cope.
THE INTERSECTION OF RACISM, SEXISM AND CLASS OPPRESSION
So why did all this happen to Rozita? One factor is that most recognisable of “values” of current Australian society – racism. As a person of non-Anglo, non-European heritage, Rozita was immediately pigeon-holed by the arrogant boys who ran the architecture world as someone who would be subservient to their demands. She was thought of as someone who could be made to do the most laborious, tedious tasks without expecting any reward. As far as establishment, white supremacist thinking was concerned, that is what coloured people are good for … and “why we let them into the country anyway.”
Then there is that most obvious aspect of what Rozita endured – male chauvinism. Discrimination against women and misogyny are fundamental features of all capitalist societies. Marxists understand that the particular form of social organisation that we call the state – with its standing army and police forces, prisons, legal system and bureaucracy – first made its appearance on Earth only once human societies began to divide into mutually exclusive and opposing classes of exploiters and exploited, rich and poor, powerful rulers and oppressed subjects who are ruled over. The ruling class has always, necessarily, been made up of a smaller number of privileged people than the masses whom they exploit and so, in order to maintain their wealth, status and power this ruling class requires the use of all the various mechanisms of state from the big stick that their bully boys wield to the propaganda penned by their faithful scribes in the media. This has been true all through the ever evolving history of the state from its origins in ancient slave-owning societies such as in Greece and Rome, through to the medieval, feudal period with its “divine right” of kings and robber barons to rule over peasants and serfs and then on to our “modern” period where it is the capitalists, the merchants, bankers and traders who have gained ascendancy over the mass of workers and who extract their wealth, primarily, through the wage labour system.
But before the advent of these various systems of mass exploitation and the state which maintains such patently unfair social organisations in place, human societies – such as was in the case in Australia before British invasion, for instance – were, generally, organised into a federation of clan groups. And such societies, based on systems of kinship and kindness, knew nothing of exploitation, the discrimination against women or misogyny. The oppression of women was given birth to when society was first divided into classes of exploiters and exploited – and capitalism, we Marxists know, will be the last form of class society.
Part of the essence of class-divided societies like capitalism is that land and means of production, rather than being the common property of all, are owned by some private individuals while many others own no such productive property at all. For those lucky enough to own productive property – no matter how small – a key part of their existence is driven by a preoccupation with passing on their property to male heirs. However, so as to be sure that their wealth isn’t claimed by the patriarch of another family, these males want their property to be passed on to heirs who are indisputably theirs. This obsession with handing down their property to their own heirs and, thus, with ensuring that their wives do not bear children to other men drive these propertied males’ compulsion to socially – and, thus, economically – isolate their wives. Meanwhile, the greedy ruling class under capitalism does not want to actually pay people to conduct the essential tasks of housework and child rearing. And so it is held incumbent upon women to, without any pay, conduct these important social functions; work that in original human civilisations – including those of most of Australia’s Aboriginal nations – had humanely and quite rightly been carried out as the collective responsibility of whole communities. The combined result of women being almost exclusively burdened with doing unpaid housework and the partial – or in worst cases almost complete – straightjacketing of women by their husbands results in women’s (on average) greatly reduced opportunity to participate equally in economic life. Herein lies the material basis for women’s subjugation under capitalism. When a woman, because of her burdens and restrictions, is financially reliant on a male partner, she is almost inevitably going to have an unequal relationship with him. In the worst cases it means that if that partner is violent or otherwise abusive, she is presented with the agonising “choice” between leaving that partner and living an impoverished life (along with her children if she is a mother) or suffering under the tyrant at home. [See “The Struggles of a Single Mother Living in Sydney’s West: Kushi Demands Justice and a Better Life” in Trotskyist Platform Issue 12 which can be found at https://trotskyistplatform.com/Kushi.html].
The reality of economic and social subjugation of women breeds a foul male chauvinist ideology that reflects this oppressive reality. This ideology, expressed in mainstream attitudes, media, government, religion and all sorts of social taboos, customs and “social norms” in turn “rationalises”, perpetuates and reinforces women’s second class status. Even compared to other capitalist societies, misogyny is especially vile in Australia. The brutal nature of capitalist White Australia’s foundation as a convict colony and the ongoing violent dispossession of and horrific acts of genocide against Australia’s First Peoples has, necessarily, brutalised all aspects of this society ever since – including gender relations. Women who are doing it hard financially and who are dependent on male partners or family are most vulnerable in such a violently misogynist society. Yet, just like relatively wealthy, dark-skinned people are not immune to the horror of White Australia racism, even financially independent women with good economic prospects can be bowled over in this capitalist society by powerful blasts of misogyny.
Cadet journalist, Amy Taeuber, was cruelly sacked by Channel 7 after she made a sexual harassment complaint against an older male reporter over a series of incidents where he allegedly made disparaging remarks about her marital status and appearance and mockingly labelled her sexual preference. Sexist bullying of women workers is rife in Australian workplaces.
Rozita was not financially dependent on a male partner or other male family members. However, she was in economic terms at the mercy of other men – her male bosses at the architecture firms she worked at. They had the “right” under this system to determine what work she got and didn’t get and the power to sack her. That’s why it took such strong principles on her part to defy them. In a formal sense these bosses were not called “bosses.” In the architecture world, as in many other lofty professions, they were known as “partners” and “directors.” However, the reality is that in big architectural firms, the labour of junior and other non-partner architects like Rozita – in this case their intellectual labour – was exploited by the partners in order to generate profit for themselves. The junior and other non-partner architects are, thus, denied part of the fruit of their own labour. In that sense, those in Rozita’s position are no different to process workers at a factory, construction workers at a building site or mine workers at a mine. Increasingly in today’s economy there are many workers whose main form of labour is intellectual – like many IT help desk and support staff, laboratory workers and CAD draughties – who are exploited just like other workers in the so-called blue collar workplace.
However, there is an important difference between the position of junior and other non-partner architects in big architectural consulting firms and that of, say, factory workers. And that is that many of the non-partner architects have hopes of, one day, becoming a “partner” themselves: that is, a small-scale, capitalist boss. What’s more, they not only have the education to one day become a “boss” too but have, moreover, even some probability of one day “rising” to such a position. It is this – and not their pay levels – which makes junior architects and others in similar positions in other professions more middle class in their reality and outlook. Working class people have a much lower probability – and, hence, less hope – of one day becoming a capitalist profiteer. What working class people do have, however, that most of those in middle class professions often don’t even realise that they are missing, is the very real chance to solidarize shoulder to shoulder in a powerful and organized collective unity alongside their working class comrades. And it is this factor that is the very key to the future of society.
THE UNITED WORKING CLASS – WITH WOMEN WORKERS AS THE SPEARHEAD – WILL LEAD THE STRUGGLE FOR WOMEN’S EMANCIPATION
Ironically, the very same reason that even junior architects are considered privileged and middle class with respect to proletarian workers also makes them, at the same time, more vulnerable to being bullied by their bosses. The hopes of one day becoming a partner in the firm gnaw away at bonds of solidarity between mistreated and exploited junior professionals. Many seek to nudge each other out of the way in their rival bids to reach the top. That is why non-partner architects are not, at this time, in droves forming themselves into unions to collectively fight for their rights. It would not be until a mass working class upsurge emerges for union consciousness to widely seep into these layers of society. The ambitious, middle class outlook of even exploited non-partner architects in the current period meant that Rozita never had anyone to really stand up for her – or even offer meaningful moral support – in all the times she suffered at various architectural firms. This is quite different to what could happen if she was one of a group of proletarian workers at a workplace. Especially if there is a workplace with a strong union presence, workers may well stand together to try and challenge sexual or other harassment of a co-worker by a boss. A genuine class struggle union leadership would be prepared to unleash union industrial action to punish the bosses for any sort of bullying of any worker. If the harassment came from a co-worker they would organise for all the other workers to drag this worker aside and resolutely reprimand and, if necessary, even severely punish him.
Union nurses and midwives march in Melbourne. Women employed in working class jobs are able to unite in unions with each other and with their male co-workers to stand up against both exploitation and sexist bullying and harrassment by bosses.
That is why it is the working class – with women workers at the forefront – that will lead the struggle for women’s liberation. We saw glimpses of this in the hundreds of proud women trade unionists who formed the backbone of the 2017 and 2018 International Women’s Day marches in Sydney. The organised working class will be the spearhead of the struggle for women’s emancipation and not only because workers’ solidarity, expressed through workers’ unions, can stand up to sexist bullying at work and demand equal pay for women workers. The working class’ interests lie in seeing the overthrow of the capitalist system – the system under which workers’ labour is exploited by business owners and under which many workers are condemned to economic insecurity and unemployment – and its replacement with the system that embodies workers’ interests, socialism. In fighting for such a revolutionary change, the working class is simultaneously struggling against the system upon which women’s oppression is based and for a system that will lay the basis for women’s emancipation. Socialism will enable women to win full economic independence by providing jobs for all workers for as many hours as each worker needs and by making the society and community responsible for the crucial tasks of housework and child rearing that are today, still, largely performed by women as unpaid labour. Thus, a socialist society would provide free pre-school education, free 24-hour childcare, free school lunches at all schools as well after-school sports, music and cultural activities provided for free by the state alongside free transport from school to and from these activities. It is simply natural for a socialist society to take these measures needed to enable women’s full participation in social and economic life since that participation maximises production and enriches society culturally. To not utilise women’s full potential is not only unfair and oppressive – it is also a terrible waste! However, the capitalist system does not operate on such rational considerations as the maximisation of total society-wide economic and artistic output. It operates solely on the basis of what is most profitable for the individual private bosses who run society.
The social and industrial power of women workers to fight for both women’s equality and workers’ rights comes as part of a united class that also, of course, includes male workers. However, male workers are shaped by a society whose media, customs, organised religion and social norms are flooded with male chauvinist attitudes. Furthermore, in this class society, where hierarchical relations between people are normalised and even celebrated, many a male worker who is exploited and bullied by his boss at work finds “solace” in being a tyrant to his female partner at home. Needless to say, such male chauvinism within the workers movement is not only poisonous to a working class fight for women’s rights but to the unity needed for workers to fight for their jobs, wages and conditions. There needs to be a determined struggle by the most conscious, enlightened workers to drive out such male chauvinism from the workers movement. This struggle is part of a broader fight to turn the working class from what it currently is – a class shaped by all the backwardness imparted into it by capitalist society – into a class that becomes aware of what it needs to do to liberate itself and all the oppressed and look with clear, unfettered eyes toward a brighter future. It is a struggle to not only purge the workers movement of male chauvinism but also of racism, nationalism and the corrosive illusions in capitalist “democracy.” It is a struggle to build a revolutionary workers party that will unite the working class, make it champion the cause of all the downtrodden and lead it in struggles that will culminate in the overturn of capitalism and the commencement of the construction of a new socialist society. When a future socialist society enables women to have complete economic independence then this will, over time, drastically change society’s attitudes, customs and behaviour.
The revolutionary party of the masses indispensable to this triumph of socialism and women’s liberation will oblige those who take the responsibility of putting themselves in the vanguard of the struggle to stand with the greatest courage, never sell out their principles under pressure and not fear making enormous sacrifices for the cause. We should be confident that many will flock to this task – especially from amongst the most oppressed sections of the masses including women, Aboriginal people, persecuted migrant-derived “ethnic” groups, LGBTI people and the lowest paid workers. As Rozita has shown, there are indeed strong people out there who are prepared to stand their ground in the face of the oppressors and refuse to compromise on their principles.
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!
Long Live China’s 1949 Anticapitalist Revolution! Protect the Great Benefits for Workers & the Rural Masses Won through the Revolution: Stop Imperialist Funding for Those NGOs that Seek to Overthrow Socialistic Rule in China
Force Profitable Companies to Increase Hiring – Make Them Wear the Resulting Lower Profits Stop Billionaire Bosses from Retrenching Workers! No to Slave Wage Internships and Work for the Dole! For Fully Paid, Permanent Jobs for All!
Smash the Cutback to Sunday Penalty Rates through Class Struggle Action
Above: Health Services Union members protest against the NSW government’s attempt to privatise healthcare by stealth by outsourcing hospital services to private businesses. Women workers – suffering both exploitation as workers and male chauvinism – are key to the working class struggle for liberation.
International Women’s Day 2017 comes at a time of heightened attacks on women – especially working class women. That is not only because a hard-core misogynist and racist, Donald Trump, has become the president of the most powerful country in the world. Working class women in Australia have to cop lower wages than men. Unaffordable childcare restricts women’s full participation in economic and social life. Meanwhile, many low income single mothers continue to be ground down by the former Gillard ALP government’s cruel cut to the single parenting payment four years ago. As always, the fate of women’s rights goes hand in hand with workers’ rights and the rights of all the oppressed including Aboriginal people, LGBTI people, coloured “ethnic” people and the unemployed. Alongside attacks on women’s social position, we are seeing the right-wing Turnbull government attack our trade unions – targeting especially the CFMEU construction workers union – and undercut weekend penalty rates for hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers. Meanwhile, all the current parliamentary parties – Pauline Hanson’s fascistic One Nation, the Liberal/National coalition, the Nick Xenophon Team, the ALP and The Greens – are all in various way inciting poisonous nationalism that inevitably targets coloured migrant-derived communities by variously blaming refugees, guest workers or overseas producers for the unemployment and insecurity caused by the capitalist system itself.
Russia, International Women’s Day, 1917: Mainly female textile workers go on strike for bread sparking a general strike and the toppling of the Tsar. The resulting revolutionary period that was opened up culminated half a year later in the October Socialist Revolution. The banner reads “Glory to the Women Fighters for Freedom!”
Women’s rights are so closely bound to the overall state of the class struggle between capitalist business owners and the working class because women’s oppression is actually built on the foundations of class-divided societies. Under capitalism’s social structure a large proportion of women are denied economic independence. With women denied the opportunity to participate equally in economic and political life, male chauvinist attitudes are spawned that “justify” and perpetuate this reality. That is why we must fight for women’s full economic independence through demanding jobs for all and for equal pay between men and women workers. We must also call for free abortion on demand and freely available access to all forms of contraception. To allow women the greatest chance to participate in economic life, we must fight for free 24-hour childcare, for free school lunches at all public schools and for after-school sports, music and cultural activities provided for free by the state alongside free transport from school to these activities. All these demands, however, clash head on with the current system because the capitalists who control the economy are not going to want to sacrifice their profits to make these social programs and full employment possible. Thus, while we can make headway in women’s emancipation through winning concessions through struggle under capitalism, we will only fully open the door to women’s complete liberation when the capitalist system is replaced by a socialist one.
However, women are not just victims of capitalism and will not simply be a major beneficiary of socialism. Working class women, who have the most to gain by ripping up this current system, will also be the key drivers of the struggle to overthrow capitalism. The most powerful example of this occurred on International Women’s Day in 1917 in Russia. It was then that in the Russian capital of Petrograd tens of thousands of mainly women textile workers walked off the job to demand bread. Their struggle sparked off a general strike and a revolt against the tsarist monarchy. The resulting revolutionary period that was opened up culminated half a year later in the October Socialist Revolution. Exactly one hundred years later and this struggle remains the shining path for the fight for women’s emancipation and for the liberation of the masses more generally.
Today, women workers alongside coloured “ethnic” and youth workers are not only amongst the workers most targeted by the slashing of Sunday penalty rates but are crucial to any fightback against this vicious attack.
In February, the “Fair Work” Commission announced its despicable decision to slash Sunday penalty rates between 25% and 50% for hospitality, restaurant, fast food, retail and pharmacy workers. The decision also cuts these workers’ public holiday pay by up to 25%. This will mean a loss of up to $6,000 per year for some workers. The Fair Work Commission’s decision, done with the backing of the Turnbull government, will hurt some of the lowest paid workers in the country. Many of these workers are already on perilous incomes, not only because their pay rates are low but because many are in insecure, casual jobs where they are forced to work less hours than they want to due to the bosses and the bosses’ capitalist system making inadequate work available. The loss of penalty rates will thus mean a huge proportion of their income will be lost. For many of these workers, the loss of penalty rates could be the difference between scraping enough to pay their rent and simply not being able to make ends meet.
Thus far, the pro-ALP leaders of our trade unions have been relying on petitions and parliament to oppose this cruel attack. However, we should not rely on a future ALP government to reverse the cuts. Although the ALP Opposition is now calling for the government to legislate against the Fair Work Commission decision, before the election ALP leader Bill Shorten announced that a future ALP government would not try to reverse a cut to penalty rates if the Fair Work commission ruled in favour of it. So, what exactly would the ALP do if it ended up being the current gang of politicians in government running the rich bosses’ state? What we can expect from the openly anti-working class, Liberal-National government, of course, goes without saying!
What we need is the mobilisation of the power of the working class in mass action – especially including industrial action – to smash the attack on the weekend and holiday pay of hospitality, restaurant, fast food, retail and pharmacy workers. This should not just be the task of the workers directly affected. This slashing of penalty rates is an attack on the entire working class. If the bosses get away with it they will be targeting penalty and shift rates of other workers. Many of those targeted by the recent attack toil in small workplaces where ruthless “small business owners” are able to get away with bullying them. That is why we need workers in larger, more heavily unionised workplaces to also flex their industrial muscle to help crush this attack on penalty rates. Such a mobilisation will also help cement ties between different components of the working class. For example if militant construction workers and maritime workers unleashed their power behind the hospitality, restaurant, fast food, retail and pharmacy workers targeted by this recent attack, they will likely see more of these lower paid workers joining their picket lines when they face impending full frontal attacks from the capitalist rulers.
CFMEU national secretary Michael O’Connor has stated the union’s opposition to the slashing of penalty rates and insisted that the CFMEU would “not stand by and watch” as the Government introduced cuts to pensions, family supplements and attempted to regain welfare overpayments. O’Connor continued that:
“The CFMEU stands ready to fight.
“This war on battlers must end.
“The war on the fair go must stop.
“Where the fightback takes place — wherever there is a picket, a rally, a campaign, whatever it is — you will see us there standing shoulder to shoulder with those under attack.”
These statements now need to be followed by actual industrial action by the CFMEU and other unions to smash the attacks on penalty rates, pensions and welfare payments.
If we can defeat this attack on penalty rates through industrial and other mass action, the union movement will win thousands of new workers – especially younger workers – to joining our ranks. We will also become more united and confident to challenge other attacks that we face including the Liberals ABCC – as well as the anti-strike provisions of Labor’s 2009 Fair Work Act – cuts to public housing and draconian cuts to social welfare for the poor.
The Fair Work Commission (FWC) decision proves once again that the industrial courts in Australia – like all the courts here – are not “independent umpires.” Rather, they form part of a capitalist state – which includes also the police, the military, prisons and the bureaucracy – that was created and is maintained for enforcing the interests of the capitalist exploiting class over the working class. Even when the FWC, on a rare occasion, makes a decision less harmful to workers’ interests then that is not because of any inherent sense of justice in the system but merely reflects those cases where workers have won the struggle on the ground in the industrial and political battlefield and the FWC is forced to accept this reality in order to maintain its credibility. That is why we should not bow to the authority of these courts even if the rules under which it operates are changed. The only law that the workers movement should be bound to respect are our decisions on what is in the interests of the working class and oppressed.
The excuse of the greedy business owners and theirFWC for slashing Sunday and holiday penalty rates is that this helps bosses hire more workers. To this we must say: No – we are not going to let you gouge the incomes of already exploited workers even more as the price we must pay to let you supposedly hire more workers. Instead, we are going to forceyou to hire more at the expense of your already bloated profits. We demand that profitable businesses be banned from cutting the size of their workforce and that profitable firms be forced to increase hiring in proportion to their profits. If the greedy business owners complain that this will make their operations impractical then we say that this only proves that the economy should not be in the hands of these capitalists but should be brought into the socialist, collective hands of working class people.
A Soviet poster advising the woman worker to take up her rifle!
Unleash the Full Power of Lower Paid, Youth, Women & Coloured “Ethnic” Workers
The FWC’s penalty rate cut will especially hurt people from the most oppressed sections of the working class – including lower paid workers, women workers, youth workers and workers from coloured “ethnic” backgrounds. These workers are crucial to the overall cause of the working class. All the obstacles that stand in the way of these workers being able to unleash their full fighting strength – like male chauvinism, skilled worker arrogance towards unskilled workers and racism – must be knocked down. Indeed, one thing that this widely hated attack on penalty rates has done is that, in the face of bi-partisan attacks on refugees and Aboriginal people, the growth in support for the extreme racist One Nation party and everyone from the Coalition to the ALP to the Greens trying to emulate the economic nationalism of hard-right, U.S. president Donald Trump, it has highlighted the truth that the cause of Australian workers’ hardships is not in the least refugees, guest workers or overseas producers but the Aussie capitalist exploiters – and the governments and state institutions that enforce their interests. We need to build a leadership of the workers movement that is committed to explaining this basic truth to the masses. One that will face down the lies of the bosses media and pro-capitalist political parties that try to divide the exploited masses with nationalism and racism. This is part of the struggle to reorient our unions away from trust in the “Australia-First”, ALP and the institutions of Australia’s capitalist state and onto a program of militant class struggle against the greedy Aussie capitalists.
Let’s smash the Australian ruling class’ attacks on hospitality, restaurant, fast food, retail and pharmacy workers! Let’s unite all workers in this country – and win crucial international solidarity action by uniting as one with our working class sisters and brothers abroad – to fight for this goal! Let’s unleash the industrial muscle of the united working class! Let’s win this battle so that we can begin to roll back the over three decades of setbacks that the workers movement has suffered!
Above: Activists establish the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy on its first day, 26 May 2014. At the front of the Bottom Left photo is embassy founder, Jenny Munro.
7 September 2015: There was a feeling of satisfaction amongst activists of the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy (RATE) as activists packed up the protest camp over the last few days. The RATE struggle had made headway in securing affordable housing for Aboriginal people in Redfern’s historic Block area. After over fifteen months of hard struggle, RATE has won an agreement whereby 62 new houses will be built on the Block to provide accommodation at low cost to Aboriginal people. Prior to the RATE struggle, it was apparent that not only would the provision of affordable housing on the Block be delayed but it would likely not be provided at all. The Aboriginal Housing Company (AHC) had removed the last of the Aboriginal residents living on The Block four years ago with the promise that they would be able to come back into affordable accommodation in newly built houses. However, by early last year it was confirmed what Aboriginal people in Redfern had long suspected: the 62 affordable housing dwellings that the AHC had promised to build as part of its Pemulwuy project were to become – at best – an afterthought to its plan for the area to be turned by the developer Deicorp into shops, office space and higher-end commercial housing for students.
RATE was established on 26 May 2014 by Aboriginal women and supporters with its central demand that affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block be built prior to any commercial development. Amongst those who set up the Embassy were Aboriginal former Block residents. RATE then quickly inspired support from Aboriginal people and other anti-racist activists angry about not only the lack of affordable housing for Aboriginal people but also the brutal oppression Aboriginal people continued to face in all aspects of their lives from racist police violence to the forced closure of remote Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal activists from Gamilaraay country in northern NSW and from far away as Queensland and Western Australia came to do stints camping at RATE while RATE was flooded with statements of solidarity from far flung places. In September last year, the morale of RATE supporters was greatly lifted by a visit to the camp by Palm Island, Aboriginal resistance hero Lex Wotton – the leader of the November 2004 uprising on that island that courageously responded to the racist police killing of Aboriginal man Mulrunji Doomadgee and the subsequent police whitewash of the murder. Those involved in overseas indigenous rights struggles from places as far away as Hawaii also visited RATE to offer their support.
On a few of the days when RATE was facing threatened eviction, dozens of students from nearby Sydney University went down to RATE in solidarity. They showed that they refused to be part of plans to turn The Block into accommodation for Sydney University students when that was being done at the expense of affordable housing for Aboriginal people. Especially crucial was the solidarity given to RATE from trade unions. From the early days of RATE, the CFMEU construction union helped with logistics such as providing RATE with a porta-loo. On the first anniversary of RATE on May 26 this year, dozens of MUA members marched down to the RATE site. As they waved union flags they expressed their determination to stand by RATE and support its demands. A joint meeting that day of RATE activists and MUA unionists stated:
Trade unionists and supporters of the Redfern Tent Embassy (RATE) gathered here on May 26 to express our ongoing solidarity with the action being taken by the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy in occupying Aboriginal land at the Block in Redfern to stop a commercial property development planned by Deicorp and the Aboriginal Housing Company.
Aboriginal housing is desperately needed and should be built before any commercial development is allowed to progress.
Many long-term Aboriginal residents of Redfern/Waterloo are currently living in overcrowded, unsuitable state housing, or are homeless, while Aboriginal land is being taken over for commercial development.
Both the Commonwealth and state governments are refusing to release public funds for any Aboriginal-controlled community housing projects anywhere in Australia. This discriminatory policy has to end. Public funding must be allocated immediately for Aboriginal community housing for the Block and across the country.
We call on trade unions, and Unions NSW, to pass similar resolutions and take political and practical steps to ensure that the proposed development does not proceed before the housing demands are met.
26 May 2015: The Maritime Union of Australia rally at The Block to support the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy on its first anniversary. Although the level of support from the union movement as a whole was modest compared to what it should have been, the support that did come from the powerful trade union movement played a role in assisting RATE to win the gains that it did.
By the last weeks of the RATE struggle, the flags of around a dozen different trade unions were flying on the RATE site showing solidarity with the Aboriginal struggle from the organised workers movement.
The strategy of RATE was powerful yet beautifully simple. By camping on the very site that the commercial development on The Block was to take place, RATE ensured that no such development could take place unless either the AHC/developers/government came to an agreement with RATE or the police unleashed violence to forcibly remove RATE. Seeing how RATE activists had refused to be deterred by either severe storms blowing down tents or by police repression or attacks by thugs and, importantly, seeing the statements of solidarity for RATE from trade unions, the government/AHC/developers calculated that they had no choice but to negotiate a settlement with RATE. After steadfastly refusing to provide any support for the development of affordable housing on The Block, the federal Liberal government reluctantly stepped in at the end to provide a $5 million grant as well as organising for a larger bank loan to fund the affordable housing. The deal done between the AHC, the federal government and RATE commits the AHC to building the affordable housing either before or simultaneously with the commercial development. Thus, if the deal is honoured, the core demand of RATE would have been achieved. The Aboriginal activists who led RATE have emphasised the need to be vigilant in order to ensure that the deal is adhered to and that no excuses are made to delay the building of the affordable housing. Furthermore, activists will need to ensure that the AHC does not knock back the Aboriginal people most in need of access to affordable housing in order to have the housing occupied by more affluent Aboriginal people who the AHC knows will be more “acceptable” to the future upper-middle class occupants of the commercial retail and residential development.
27 August 2015: Key Aboriginal activists spearheading RATE confident as the struggle heads towards securing gains for affordable housing for Aboriginal people.
Of course, given the level of homelessness that Aboriginal people in inner-city Sydney suffer and the extreme level of racist discrimination that Aboriginal people face when trying to rent privately, there is a need for much more than 62 affordable dwellings on The Block. Ideally the entire re-development of The Block should be to provide low rent public housing for Aboriginal people and associated services. Such a re-development would also have better ensured that The Block was retained as a social and political centre for Aboriginal people. However, the fact is that what will likely now be built on The Block as a result of the RATE struggle is a lot better than what was on the cards prior to this struggle.
A Decades Long War on Aboriginal Housing on The Block by Greedy Developers and Racist Governments
Aboriginal people have been living on The Block in low-rent housing since the early 1970s. This affordable housing had been won through a struggle by Aboriginal militants and the militant Builders Labourers Federation trade union. That struggle which triumphed in early 1973 forced the then Whitlam Labor federal government to provide a grant for Aboriginal people to collectively buy up the area. The Aboriginal housing in the area came to be managed by the Aboriginal Housing Company (AHC) which was established by the activists who fought for The Block for the sole purpose of providing comfortable and happy low-rent accommodation for Aboriginal people. Despite facing much racist discrimination – including from banks reluctant to do dealings with an Aboriginal organisation – the AHC’s work in its early days ensured that low-rent accommodation came to be provided for up to 300 Aboriginal people on The Block.
However, like most economic or social organisations – whether black, white, “ethnic” or multiracial – that exist in capitalist Australia without a clear anti-capitalist perspective, the AHC became more and more subordinated to the agendas of powerful economic interests. Specifically, the AHC ended up speaking not for the interests of low-income Aboriginal tenants – as it was originally constructed to do – but became a vehicle for the schemes of wealthy capitalist developers and their mates in government. In the eyes of these developers, The Block was prime inner-city real estate which could be turned into a lot of money. And they were determined to lay their grubby hands on it! They wanted to gain access to the land so that they could eject low-income Aboriginal tenants and build high-end commercial housing and shops that would sell for big bucks. Successive NSW state governments, which like all governments in capitalist Australia serve the interest of the corporate exploiting class, have been happy to sing along to the tune of these greedy developers.
Racist governments had an additional motive for wanting to dilute the Aboriginal character of The Block. The Block came to be not only a centre of Aboriginal culture and a meeting place for Aboriginal people from all over Australia but also a centre of Aboriginal political resistance against racist oppression. Over the years, many rallies for Aboriginal land rights and against racist police violence started, finished or passed through The Block. In February 2004, The Block and nearby Lawson Street saw hundreds of Aboriginal youth courageously hold their ground in a nine-hour pitched battle with racist cops. The youth were 100% justifiably responding to provocations by Redfern police who clamped down on the community after racist cops had murdered 17 year-old Aboriginal youth TJ Hickey. Earlier, in May 1981 and then seven months later, 200 Aboriginal people responded to incessant racist police harassment by barricading Eveleigh Street on The Block and bravely responding to the marauding police by throwing projectiles back at them. There have also been numerous smaller versions of such heroic acts of resistance to racist police violence on The Block.
The developers and government’s agenda was greatly facilitated by the AHC’s journey away from its founding spirit as a community organisation set up by militant black activists. One indication of just how far the AHC has travelled was seen in the way that AHC CEO Mick Mundine held a joint press conference with Redfern top cop Luke Freudenstein in February last year to express his support to Redfern police in their condemnation of a large protest march demanding justice for TJ Hickey on the tenth anniversary of TJ’s killing by racist cops.
1967: Aboriginal activists from the Gurundji stockmen and domestic hands’ strike together with Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) members at a meeting to support the Gurundji struggle for land rights. The leftist-led BLF trade union would later play a key role in the Aboriginal struggle for affordable housing on Redfern’s The Block. The workers’ movement must stand solidly behind the struggle for justice of Aboriginal people.
The AHC’s drift away from its original purpose of serving low-income Aboriginal tenants was the result of the confluence of several currents. One force pushing the AHC away from its stated purpose was simply the pressure of the capitalist “free market.” As an entity that had no stable source of external funding and was meant to operate within the confines of “market principles,” the AHC, as a body without a clear anti-capitalist agenda, inevitably became easy game for whoever had the market power to either promise to deliver housing construction and maintenance at a lower price or on the other hand promised, in exchange for land use rights for commercial development, big money that could be used to subsidise its housing program. In this way, the AHC became associated with and dependent on wealthy capitalist corporations who began to use that influence to set more and more of the AHC’s agenda. Prominent on the AHC’s own website’s list of “Partners” is not only the developer Deicorp but Westpac Bank and the South Sydney Business Chamber. Then there was developers and governments directly influencing the AHC leaders through financial enticements. Some in the Aboriginal community have long suspected this has involved outright bribery of AHC leaders. To be sure, that would hardly be just a problem with the AHC – just look at successive NSW state governments! From developers handing over tens of thousands of dollars in cash to politicians in brown paper bags to business bosses bribing the former premier with an expensive “gift,” the last few years have revealed just a small fraction of the massive corruption that the leaders of this state wallow in. Yet just as the big business bosses can control politicians with more “legal” forms of enticements – like large donations to the respective political parties and invitations to sit in corporate boxes at sporting events – so too can greedy developers and their government cronies bring an organisation like the AHC under its control through more subtle but even more insidious means of buying influence. This could include offering AHC leaders invitations to fancy business/government lunches and functions and seducing AHC leaders into making them feel that they are part of elite circles by allowing them to participate in government/corporate policy discussion sessions.
As the AHC bent to the pressures of the capitalist “free market” and came under the increasing influence of rich corporations and the state government, staunch Aboriginal activists and grassroots tenants who objected to all this were increasingly purged from the organisation and its leadership. This in turn further accelerated the AHC’s path away from its original purpose.
When the pressure of “market imperatives” and corrupting influences was not enough to bring the AHC completely into the developers’/government’s fold, the NSW state government unleashed its “legal” muscle to bring the AHC to heel. Thus, even long after the AHC had sold out its founding principles, the NSW government at first refused to give the AHC planning approval for its Pemulwuy project. The government insisted that there be even less affordable housing for Aboriginal people in a re-developed Block than the AHC had proposed. Indeed, even as Aboriginal people were being squeezed out of The Block, the 1995-2011 NSW ALP government refused, for a whole decade, to give the rebuilding of affordable homes for Aboriginal people planning approval until the AHC agreed to give further priority to the commercial aspects of the Pemulwuy project. To resist such bullying from the government would have taken a campaign of mass protest action. The AHC did very briefly flirt with a diluted version of this idea and even organised a hundreds strong protest rally in Redfern in August 2006 in support of affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block. Yet already by then the AHC had strayed way too far into the camp of the enemies of Aboriginal people’s rights to honestly want to sustain such a campaign. What is more, the AHC had by then lost any real credibility with the grass roots Aboriginal people needed to wage such a campaign anyway.
As far back as twenty years ago, the AHC first started in effect implementing the developers’ and government’s plan to drive Aboriginal tenants off The Block. In the mid-1990s, Block residents were enraged when they confirmed that the AHC had drawn up plans to actually abolish all affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block and, instead, planned to turn most of the area into commercial office space. Although they later modified this plan, the AHC had already started creating facts on the ground by neglecting repairs on houses so much that tenants could not tolerate it anymore and started leaving The Block “voluntarily”.
Police stampeding around Redfern’s The Block. The Aboriginal community on The Block faced decades of violent police raids and racist bullying.
Meanwhile, police attacks on Aboriginal people in Redfern assisted the ruling class agenda of driving Aboriginal tenants off The Block. This police violence was not solely about kicking low-income people off from prime real estate. It was also motivated by pure racism – by the racist culture that permeates the police force and which, in turn, arises naturally from the police’s role as the enforcers of an unequal and discriminatory social order based on the dispossession of this country’s first peoples and the exploitation of labour by wealthy business owners. However, the big end of town’s agenda to push black people off prime inner-city real estate gave the police attacks added impetus. Aside from daily bullying of Aboriginal youth, almost every year saw a large-scale police assault on The Block. One of the most brutal such raids took place on 8 February 1990.9 It was on that day, just before 4am, that some 135 cops led by the heavily armed Tactical Response Group (whose functions today are largely performed by the Public Order and Riot Squad) smashed into several homes on The Block with sledgehammers and iron bars. Residents woke up terrified as they saw these men bearing shotguns break into their homes and point weapons at them. The police put guns to women’s heads, roughed up residents and abused people. But after all that the police did not charge anyone with a serious offence like a violent crime or even charges of dealing in drugs or weapons. Of the eight charges that they did bring against people, two were for unpaid fines, one was a more than 7 year old warrant for breach of bail, another a warrant for failing to appear at a court nearly six years earlier and another a warrant for a resident allegedly being drunk on a train close to six years earlier! Additionally, three people were charged with having possession of stolen goods because they could not provide receipts for relatively minor items like a TV, a radio cassette player, an electric shaver and unbelievably a pair of goggles! And for this the local community was terrorised and left traumatised. To put it all into perspective, nearly one and a half times as many police were mobilised to find a couple of allegedly stolen TVs and a pair of goggles on The Block as the 92 police who were put on duty in Cronulla on 11 December 2005 when the police knew full well that the violent, white supremacist riot that subsequently took place there was indeed very likely to happen! Police terror against the Redfern Aboriginal community culminated in the February 2004 killing of 17 year-old TJ Hickey by racist police who rammed his bicycle while he was riding on it and impaled the boy on a steel paling.
The incessant police attacks, the demoralising effect of living in houses where repairs were not being done and the daily discrimination that Aboriginal people faced in employment and every aspect of their lives inevitably led to social problems on The Block. These problems were played up by the capitalist-owned media and seized on by the state government to justify their push to drive Aboriginal tenants out of the area. The combined effect of relentless police attacks, the deterioration of the houses, social problems and the AHC’s push to move tenants off The Block meant that by late 2010 there were just 35 people living on The Block – down from a peak of over 300. To get the last of the tenants to move, the AHC on the one hand threatened higher rents and eviction orders and, on the other hand, promised residents that they would be able to move back once the re-development took place. Residents, however, were sceptical about being able to move back and expected that the 62 new affordable houses would still be way out of their price range. What really enraged former Block residents and supporters of affordable housing for Aboriginal people was when last year AHC CEO, Mick Mundine, claimed that it was not commercially viable to pursue affordable housing on the Block. ‘’That’s on the back burner at the moment,’’ he said. ‘’Our first priority is the commercial build’’ (The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 2014). It was this confirmation of the fears of many that led Aboriginal activists to establish RATE.
From 1972 to 2015: The Struggle for Affordable Housing for Aboriginal People on The Block Continues
1970s: Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal BLF union members working on the construction of affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block.
The enemies of RATE tried everything to defeat the RATE struggle including a series of violent attacks on RATE activists. Family members of a senior AHC employee staged several of these attacks. In one attack last year, at least one of these family members was amongst a group of four men that came to the embassy and assaulted RATE activist, Raymond Munro. Yet when police arrived, it was Raymond Munro and another RATE activist who had come to his defence that the cops arrested and charged with affray. Police only charged two of the actual four attackers. Also last year, another relative of the senior AHC employee invaded the embassy in the dark of night – bearing a piece of wood – and attacked two women including embassy founder Jenny Munro. Enemies of RATE also seemed to have enlisted criminal elements to stage random attacks on RATE activists staffing the embassy or to enter the embassy grounds with the aim of causing fear and disruption. Amongst the most frightening attack was when occupants of a black, flashy four-wheel drive vehicle passed RATE on two separate occasions and hurled flares at the embassy. They aimed to set the tents on fire.
Alongside the attacks by thugs, RATE faced repression from the organs of the capitalist state. The police arrested four key RATE activists during the duration of the struggle – outrageously all resulting from incidents where violent intruders and provocateurs had invaded the embassy grounds. The arrested RATE activists were then set bail conditions banning them from the vicinity of The Block, thus laying bare the police strategy – to strip RATE of its key activists. Amongst those whom the police arrested – and for a period banned from the Block – was RATE leader Jenny Munro.
Meanwhile, in August, the NSW Supreme Court ruled against RATE and ordered its eviction. In doing so the courts stayed true to form, proving once again that like the police, prisons and entire legal/state machinery they are an instrument for the oppression of Aboriginal people and all the exploited and oppressed by the big end of town. Yet despite all that was thrown at RATE and its activists the struggle made a significant advance. Congratulations to all those who joined the struggle. It was the Aboriginal activists in RATE that provided the leadership and the strong drive that was key to success. The Aboriginal activists spearheading the movement deeply understood not only how the lack of affordable housing has forced many Aboriginal people into homelessness but also the importance of saving the Aboriginal character of The Block given its special significance as a historic centre for militant black resistance against racial oppression. Many non-Aboriginal people also supported the RATE struggle. This included people from various non-white “ethnic” communities – who especially identify with the Aboriginal rights struggle because of their own experiences in racist white Australia – as well as committed anti-racist white activists. Special mention here must be made to activists with links to the anarchist Black Rose collective who did a lot of heavy lifting in terms of staffing and protecting the embassy at night. Trotskyist Platform activists also did regular night and graveyard shifts to guard the embassy. Also participating in the struggle were activists from Socialist Alliance and individuals from a wide range of different anti-racist political standpoints. When RATE held rallies – both on as well as outside The Block– still broader layers of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people joined these actions to express their support.
15 June 2014: Hundreds gather to defend the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy (RATE). RATE attracted broad support from supporters of Aboriginal rights and campaigners for affordable housing.
Just like RATE, Aboriginal housing on The Block was first won in a hard fought struggle. That early 1970s struggle faced even more obstacles than RATE did but, at the same time, was bolstered by a higher level of trade union support than the RATE struggle received. The back drop of the original struggle for affordable housing on The Block was the movement of many Aboriginal people from rural areas to the city in search of work. Many found work at the Eveleigh rail yards (at the site of what is now the Australian Technology Park) where they were paid terribly low wages – much lower than other workers. However, due to rampant discrimination by racist bosses, many Aboriginal people could not get work at all. To compound their problems, discrimination by landlords meant Aboriginal people had trouble getting tenancy in rental properties. In the early 1970s some of the homeless Aboriginal people would squat in unoccupied houses owned by absentee landlords in the area that later became known as The Block. They were often arrested and brutalised by local police who imposed a defacto selective curfew on Aboriginal people. Meanwhile, the racist South Sydney Council ran a campaign against those – including a local church – who would offer shelter to homeless Aboriginal people. As a result, in late 1972 black militants and allied anti-racist white people organised a plan to move homeless Aboriginal people into the unoccupied houses in Louis Street in what is now part of The Block. Those houses had been bought up by a greedy developer called Ian Kiernan (who would later founded Clean Up Australia and was awarded an “Australian of the Year” award). Kiernan had evicted all the previous mostly Aboriginal renters and planned to re-develop and gentrify the area with the aim of renting out the new dwellings at higher rates.
Being greedy capitalists, Kiernan and his firm, IBK, of course objected to the Aboriginal squatters. However, the leftist-led Builders Labourers Federation trade union made it clear to him that no work on his development would take place if the Aboriginal people were evicted. Meanwhile, several trade unions organised for work to be done to renovate the homes which were in a poor condition. As one of the former black militants that spearheaded the struggle for the Block, the late Bob Bellear, put it:
“The now exiled State Builders’ Labourers, through Bob Pringle, were called in to erect doors, fix windows etc., while some members of the Plumbers Union fixed taps, toilets and other plumbing facilities required for a more liveable habitation. The electricians turned on the power …”
– “How the Aboriginal Housing Project Was Born”, Bob Bellear, Koori History website
During the struggle, the black militants and their anti-racist white allies faced constant harassment and almost weekly arrests by the police. They were especially targeted by the NSW Police’s hated 21 Division – elite special operations cops (following police reorganisations its functions today are performed by the police’s Public Order and Riot Squad and its Tactical Operations Unit). One of the 21 Division’s favourite tactics was to send in people to cause trouble and then to arrest as many Aboriginal people and their friends as possible in the ensuring raid on “grounds” like swearing, public drunkenness and resisting arrest. Meanwhile, the ALP-led South Sydney Council also did everything possible to oppose the struggle for housing for the homeless Aboriginal people. The racist Council was encouraged by a local community group formed by racist white residents fanatically opposed to the Aboriginal occupants. One night one of these white residents, a security guard, entered the houses where Aboriginal occupants were living and opened fire with live ammunition!
However, despite all this the Aboriginal militants and their BLF union allies stood firm. As it was clear that the Aboriginal struggle was determined to face down any opposition and with the BLF preventing any capitalist development in the area, the Labor federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Gordon Bryant, bowed to demands from the Aboriginal militants to provide a grant for Aboriginal people to collectively buy up the area freehold and renovate the houses to use them to provide affordable accommodation for the most needy Aboriginal people. This victory was achieved in April 1973.
7 November 2008: Flags of the MUA union proudly fly at a 200-strong demonstration in Sydney in support of Lex Wotton – the Palm Island Aboriginal resistance leader who led the November 2004 uprising that responded to the whitewash of the police murder in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee. The Sydney rally was held to coincide with the sentencing hearing that Lex Wotton had to face in a Townsville court for his part in the heroic struggle. Like the BLF in its work in support of the struggle for affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block in the early 1970s, the MUA took industrial action in support of the crucial struggle to defend Lex Wotton
Lessons of the Struggles for Affordable Housing on The Block
Affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block was won in a period of much working class and other progressive social struggles. The early 1970s was also a time when the U.S. and Australian capitalist rulers were weakened by the defeats they were suffering in their brutal war against the communist workers and peasants of Vietnam. Meanwhile, just five years before The Block was won, capitalist rule in France had its foundations shaken by the militant May 1968 general strike and factory occupations by millions of French workers. A year later, Italy saw similar convulsive struggles that came to be known as the Hot Autumn. Fearful of the threat of socialist revolution that had been posed by the French and Italian events, anxious about the wave of working class and other progressive struggles, weakened by the defeats it was suffering in Vietnam and terrified at the open support for the Vietnamese revolutionaries by a significant number of Australian leftist workers and youth, the Australian capitalist rulers felt the need to make concessions to the masses in order to stave off events that seemed to be heading in a revolutionary direction. Thus, the late 1960s and early 1970s was a period when not only was The Block won but advances were made more broadly in Aboriginal rights, workers’ rights and women’s rights and headway was made in undermining the racist White Australia Policy exclusion of non-white immigrants. Similar gains were won in this period by the working class and downtrodden in Europe and the United States.
Yet by the early 1980s, capitalist rule had stabilised worldwide. We now saw a right-wing period of union-busting and a Cold War anti-communist push against the socialistic USSR and Vietnam. In the mid-1980s, the Hawke Labor government and Victorian and NSW state ALP governments together smashed the BLF union that had been so crucial to winning affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block. In the period from 1989-1992, socialistic rule was destroyed in the former USSR and allied East European countries like Hungary and East Germany. The capitalist ruling classes of the world were greatly emboldened by this and felt they could get away with further attacking the rights of the masses at home. The period of the 1980s Cold War and then post-Soviet capitalist triumphalism has seen unions and workers’ rights diminished, the gap between rich and poor widen, Aboriginal rights and organisations undermined, mandatory detention of refugees introduced and the Left weakened. It is in this context that the decades-long campaign by the developers and NSW government to drive Aboriginal tenants off The Block gathered steam.
The 1980s anti-communist Cold War against the Soviet Union and the subsequent collapse of the USSR was associated with intense union-busting and racist attacks at home. Left: A statue of Lenin is pulled down during the 1991-92 counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet workers state. Centre: Victorian police brutally arrest members of the Builders Labourers Federation during the late 1980s smashing of that militant trade union. Right: A still from a 1992 video that outraged any decent person. White NSW police officers at a charity function wear blackface and mock Aboriginal people who have been killed in custody. The despicable racist cop shown in the photo said “I’m Lloyd Boney” as he impersonates an Aboriginal man hanging. Five years earlier, Lloyd Boney had been found hung in Brewarrina police station just one and a half hours after being arrested. He was widely understood to have been murdered by racist cops. It was during this period of racist, anti-working class reaction that the campaign by the developers and NSW government to drive Aboriginal tenants off The Block gathered steam.
The world we live in is still affected by the direct and indirect effects of the restoration of capitalism in the former USSR. Yet, in the last several years, we have also seen periods of militant worker and progressive social struggles in Greece, Nepal, Portugal and Spain. Inevitably there will again be a period of a sustained upswing in the class struggle like the late 1960s-early 1970s because the capitalist economic system, which is lurching from one economic crisis to another, leaves the masses no choice but to fight back against the ever greater suffering it imposes on us. However, to be able to open the doors to such an upsurge and, most importantly, to be able to channel it to a decisive victory we should learn the lessons of every struggle of the past. The RATE struggle is especially important in this regard because in a period when most struggles have been defeated or have not been able to make much headway, RATE made gains.
One reason for its success is, obviously, the steely determination of the Aboriginal leaders of RATE and the courage of all who participated in the struggle. Yet, many losing struggles have also had a combination of leaders devoted to the cause and brave activists. Key in the RATE struggle was the fact that the movement’s main strategy was not focussed on appeals to the government or mainstream politicians, legal action or other methods based on trust in one or another institution of the racist rich people’s state. Instead, RATE’s primary focus was to create facts on the ground through mass direct action – that is, by establishing itself at the heart of the area where the commercial development on The Block was to take place so the development could not proceed while the Embassy was still standing. Although the capitalist governments had the power through their cops and courts to physically evict RATE, in the end it calculated that doing so would incite such a firestorm of social protest that it would be better to make concessions. Mainstream politicians would have noted that the many police/legal/thug attacks on RATE had not deterred the movement one bit and realised that any eviction of RATE would have to be a major and violent police operation that would enrage RATE’s many supporters nationwide. They would have been aware of the large size of the protests against the closure of remote Aboriginal communities and have been worried that a brutal attack on RATE would only fuel these protests and increase the authority of the staunch, radical wing of the Aboriginal movement. Furthermore, although the level of union support given to RATE was relatively modest, the social power of the workers movement is so great that its endorsement of RATE was in itself a significant deterrent to the authorities. The ruling class would have been worried that a violent eviction of RATE could have provoked a backlash by sections of the workers movement and they would especially have dreaded the prospect of the CFMEU construction union slapping a ban on the commercial development in the same way as the BLF did in the original 1970s struggle for The Block. Perhaps, most of all, the capitalist rulers would have been very concerned that not only had many workers unions endorsed RATE but that RATE was sending contingents of activists to support an MUA wharfies’ picket line at Port Botany. Most of all, the exploiting class fears steps towards uniting the militancy of the most subjugated sections of the population – like Aboriginal people –with the social power of the organised working class: the enemy knows that this will be a formidable combination.
Federal Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Nick Scullion (Left), was involved in a deal between the Aboriginal Housing Company and the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy (RATE) that saw the latter make headway on its key demand that affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block be built prior to any commercial development. Scullion was forced to make this concession to RATE because through mass, direct action and with the backing of trade unions, RATE posed a physical obstruction to future commercial development. Scullion’s concession, finally wrested out of him after 15 months of RATE’s hard struggle, does not change the fact that Scullion is an enemy of the struggle for Aboriginal rights who carried out the racist policy of cutting federal funding for remote Aboriginal communities. Right: 19 March 2015 rally in Perth against the government’s forced closure of Aboriginal communities.
It is important that the gains won by the RATE struggle not be remembered as a case of “if you bang on about something long enough the politicians do start to listen.” Indeed, the involvement of mainstream politicians with the RATE campaign – even to make themselves look good – had been very minimal. A couple of Greens politicians did, on very rare occasions, pop into RATE but as is typical did not widely publicise their claimed solidarity with RATE and made little effort to make it a national issue. When, at the very end, the federal government eventually came up with funding for affordable housing on The Block, a whole fifteen months after the start of the RATE struggle, Minister for Indigenous Affairs Nick Scullion pretended that he was sympathetic to the RATE struggle and was making the grant out of sympathy for Aboriginal people’s rights. This is the same Nick Scullion that cut off federal funding for remote Aboriginal communities! The truth is that the Liberal and ALP politicians accept the current capitalist order and are mates with the greedy developers. Nick Scullion did not have a sudden change of heart but simply wanted to make himself look good while making a concession that he has been forced into. There is no way that Nick Scullion would have made the concession that he did if activists had simply been making submissions and representations to him without the presence of RATE as a physical obstruction to future commercial development. RATE made headway because it was based on mass, direct action by determined Aboriginal activists and non-Aboriginal anti-racists and because it won trade union support. As RATE leader, Jenny Munro, put it:
“I’m old school. My teachers taught me the principles of our resistance – we never ceded our land to anyone.
“The embassy has demonstrated that for our people, resistance is the only way to go.”
The lessons of the RATE struggle not only has implications for the struggle for Aboriginal rights but also for the broader struggle for affordable rental accommodation and for the entire struggle of the oppressed and exploited. To maximize the chance of being victorious, the struggles of the working class and all of the downtrodden demands a strategy based on mass, direct action and not at all upon reliance on the state institutions and mainstream political parties that serve the capitalist ruling class. In order for struggles waged in this way to achieve major victories against a powerful and ruthless exploiting class – and when the opportunity arises to culminate in the seizure of state power by the oppressed masses – the movements need to be buttressed around the strength of the organised working class. However, for the power of the workers movement to be unleashed, the influence of illusions in a capitalist parliament, divisive “Aussie workers first” nationalism and the loyalty to the capitalist order promoted by the ALP social democrats needs to be purged from the workers movement. We need to turn the workers movement into one that only trusts in its own power united with all the downtrodden, that fights for workers of all races, nations and pay levels to stand together truly as one and which champions the cause of all the downtrodden. Let’s be encouraged by the successes of the RATE struggle to work harder for this goal so that victories for the oppressed will not be rarities but will, instead, become commonplace and part of the long march towards a final revolutionary victory.
Above: China, May 2013: Prospective tenants visit a new public rental housing complex in Shanghai. In the first nine and a half months of 2015, socialistic China had started construction of almost 7 million public housing units. The Chinese government has planned for 18 million public housing dwellings to be built or rebuilt between 2015 and 2017.
STOP THE SELL-OFF OF PUBLIC HOUSING!
MASSIVELY INCREASE PUBLIC HOUSING JUST LIKE SOCIALISTIC CHINA IS DOING!
On 16 July 2015, a speakout rally was held in the multi-racial working class Sydney suburb of Auburn to oppose the cuts by governments of all stripes to public services. The protest was held under the slogans, Smash the Cuts to Services Working Class People Need the Most! Stop the Sell-Off Public Housing. Massively Increase Public Housing – Just Like China is Doing. No to Abbott’s Squeezing of Public Hospitals and Schools. Rollback the Former ALP Government’s Cut to the Sole Parent Payment.
The demonstration was held because the capitalist big-end of town and the governments that serve them are waging all-sided attacks on the services that working class people need the most. These attacks, alongside bosses’ cuts to workers’ conditions, are making life harder and harder for working class people. Whether we are employed workers, unemployed workers, single mothers, pensioners or students, we are all feeling the pinch.
One of the crucial public services that are under attack is public housing. We need public housing because the greedy private sector developers who determine what is built in the private sector know that they can make a lot more money building expensive homes for the wealthy rather than affordable homes for the masses.
Bulli, 11 October 2014: Members of the Illawara-based Public Housing Union and pro-public housing activists from Sydney – including Millers Point residents and Trotskyist Platform supporters – protest the sell-off of yet another public housing dwelling as yuppy real estate agents conducting the sale look on.
So we need low-rent public housing to alleviate this situation. But what are governments doing? The very opposite! From Millers Point and the Rocks in the inner city to Auburn, Bonyrigg and Claymore in western and south-western Sydney to Bellambi and Wollongong in the Illawara, the authorities are selling off or demolishing public Continue reading SMASH THE CUTS TO SERVICES WORKING CLASS PEOPLE NEED THE MOST!→
