Australia

Pages from a militant life: Why are there homeless in a rich society?

In my last article I touched on housing. I want to explore the issue more. I was born and have spent most of my life in Queensland, Australia. It is a big place, seven times the size of Great Britain and two and a half times the size of Texas. For most of its history it has been governed by very conservative conservatives and very conservative social democrats. It is a conservative state today, ruled by the Labor Party for most of the last 30 years. That conservatism has held sway over housing policy for many decades, with the result that in a state which in many ways is very wealthy, there...

Workers Liberty Australia Newsletter #73 Sept 2022

Workers Liberty newsletter No 73 Sept 2022 Contents: * Avoid Labor's disappointments! Organise to win! * Anti-democratic shenanigans at NSW PSA * Liverpool Dockers: rebellion and betrayal * Exploitation rises in Myanmar * Diary of a construction worker

Liverpool Dockers: A history of rebellion and betrayal

Please share this contribution about the Liverpool Dockers’ strike, global union solidarity, democracy, and betrayal by Jack Heyman, a dockworker from California. He spoke at a panel discussion of Mike Carden’s book - A History of the Liverpool Dockers: rebellion and betrayal , about the Liverpool Docks strike from 1995-1998. Jack says “Any young worker who is interested in trade union organizing should read Mike’s book which movingly documents the necessity of fighting to implement decisions democratically taken by the membership but denied by an ossified, class collaborationist trade union...

More anti-democratic shenanigans at the NSW Public Service Association

Some New South Wales Public Service Association members will remember when the PSA/CPSU leadership - Rank & File as they like to call themselves – brought in ‘winner takes all’ in union elections. At first the undemocratic tactic worked for the Rank & File faction. With this rule in place meetings of the union's governing body - Central Council – lasted just 15 -20-minutes. Questions and discussion were not encouraged. The Progressives PSA group restored proportional representation when they later won the leadership of Central Council. The Progressives valued different opinions and genuine...

Avoid Labor’s disappointments! Organise to win!

Celebrating the end of Scott Morrison’s LNP Coalition government has been a great relief from an elitist, mean-minded, anti-union, punitive, sexist, racist, climate science denying political period. It has raised hopes and expectations for change, that a Labor Government could tackle problems related to incomes and the cost of living, financial insecurity, health, care and education, justice for indigenous Australians, discrimination and to climate and the environment. Hopes have been kept up by some positive steps in the first 3-4 months, including the commitment to an Indigenous Voice to...

Pages from a militant life: Richer and more predatory

One of my first observations, as I look back over decades as a workplace and union activist, is a societal and class observation. Society and the working class overall are much, much richer in material goods than I could have imagined as a child in Brisbane, Australia, in the sixties and early seventies. There were four children in my family, two boys and two girls. Mum was full-time stay-at-home (as most married women were then) and Dad was a merchant seafarer. We were not poor, nor were we “well off”. We were average in many respects. Mum was adamant that the invention of the washing machine...

Diary of a construction worker: The dreams are different

Conversations with my workmates now, as a traffic controller on construction and civil engineering sites in Queensland, Australia, are completely different from what I had before as a seafarer and a construction worker. We are employed by traffic-control contractors which function like labour-hire companies, and there are almost no conversations with the workers directly employed on the sites. Traffic controllers want to talk about traffic. There’s almost no talk of politics. There are a lot of complaints about how we are treated by management — by the labour-hire companies, that is, not the...

Profit-taking, not wages, behind price surge

The Australia Institute, a leftish think-tank, has found that of the 4.1% rise in consumer prices in Australia between 1 July 2021 and 1 April 2022, the bulk can be put down to bosses taking advantage of post-lockdown recovery and supply blockages to boost profits, and only a tiny amount to bosses passing on increased wage costs. Moreover, the pattern holds since at least June 2019: increased prices have come from bosses seeing a chance to increase mark-up, not from them passing on wage costs or even increased taxes. The Australia Institute also reports research from the European Central Bank...

Teal is not as bad as blue, but we need red

Australia's federal election on 21 May now has 81.6% of the vote counted, and has produced a narrow Labor majority in the lower house (77 Labor, 58 Coalition (conservatives), four Greens, 12 independents and miscellaneous). It's a better result than in 2019. That looked like shaping up to be "the climate election", in the aftermath of the big 2018 school students' climate strikes; Labor made more of a show then of green policies; polls had predicted a Labor win. But then the ostentatiously right-wing and climate-careless Coalition led by Scott Morrison gained a seat, Labor fell back a little...

Lillian Lane Murphy, 2003-2021

Lilly Murphy, who died from cancer on 4 November 2021, joined the Socialist Alliance in Melbourne when she was in high school. Like many other children of socialists, Lilly was in agreement with her parents’ general worldview. Her parents, Maureen Murphy and Richard Lane, met through left politics, and share a similar commitment to anti-capitalist, democratic, working class, revolutionary socialism, that fights for the rights of all oppressed people. Richard Lane has been a supporter of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and predecessors since 1981. Lilly, unlike most children of socialists...

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