Photo Above: Tens of thousands of CFMEU members and other trade unionists march in Melbourne on 28 August 2024 as part of a series of a nationwide stop-work rallies by construction workers opposing the takeover of the CFMEU union by a government administrator.
Photo: Joel Carrett/AAP

Junk the ALP and ACTU Leaders …
and Never Let These Class Traitors Back!
Urgently Build a New Workers Party to Lead
Class War against the Capitalist Ruling Class!

Kick the Administrators
Out of the CFMEU!

26 August 2024 – The Albanese Labor government has launched the biggest direct attack on the union movement in Australia in nearly four decades. They have put the CFMEU construction workers union into “administration”. This means a takeover of the union by the bosses’ state. Already the regime has thrown over 280 CFMEU officials out of their positions.

In leading this attack, ALP leaders are bowing down to the demands of the capitalist class … as they always do! The owners of construction companies and labour hire firms are ecstatic. They know that if the CFMEU is gutted by the administrators, it will be much less able to defend workers’ wages and safety conditions. And it is not just the construction industry bigwigs who are celebrating. All businesses owners that make profit from stealing the fruits of workers’ labour are cheering. They know that weakening this country’s staunchest union will eventually lead to lower wages and weakened workers rights throughout the country. This means more mansions, more prestige cars and more luxury yachts for these greedy bosses.

But this attack can still be stopped! CFMEU rank and file members are defiant and don’t want to throw in the towel. There are huge numbers of members of other trade unions, other working class people and many others who are furious at this attack. Together we can defeat the administrators, AlbaNazi, Dutton and the capitalist bosses behind them all. So let’s: Boot the administrators out of the CFMEU! Kick the bosses’ state out of the union movement!

How can we do this? Some CFMEU leaders, ousted from their positions by the scum Administrators, are trying to beat this attack through various court challenges. But these are the very same bosses’ courts that have fined and persecuted hundreds of union activists for defending their members’ rights and safety. These courts are part of the same state as the cops who always side with the corporate bigwigs against striking workers. And these courts are part of the same capitalist state as the administrators now skewering the CFMEU! The whole state machinery in Australia has been established to enforce the interests of the capitalist exploiters of workers. It is futile to rely on the courts of this capitalist state to protect us from the capitalist bosses and their government! 

The way we can kick the administrators out is through strike action. That is the power that workers have. We need an indefinite, national construction workers strike. With the CFMEU under control of the bosses’ state and with many ousted leaders hesitating about full throttle action and distracted by their court strategy, the indefinite strike will need to be organised by rank and file unionists. Workers need to organise branch meetings, elect committees and then coordinate across sites. This can be done! And when indefinite strike action is launched, there will be plenty of members of other unions, other working class people and other decent people who will flock to the picket lines to help staff them. Other unions must also launch solidarity strikes – beginning with those that have stated support for the CFMEU like the Electrical Trades Union (ETU), the United Firefighters Union (UFF), the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union (CEPU) and the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA). But there is no time to lose!

This Was Never About Stopping
“Corruption” and “Criminality”

The ruling class initially claimed that their war on the CFMEU was about rooting out “criminal elements” and “corruption”. But their allegations were vague and untested. To the extent that there is actually any truth to these accusations of “criminality” and “corruption”, they should be handled 100% within the workers movement. Definitely not by institutions of the bosses state! That means that these allegations must not be decided by government legislation or administrators; and they should also not be decided by the capitalist state’s courts, which are inherently biased against militant unions. Moreover, everyone knows that it is the construction firm owners who are the ones who are mafia-infested and corrupt as hell. The simple fact is that the Australian ruling class’ hyping up of claims of “corruption” and “criminality” within the CFMEU is entirely a smokescreen that they are using to de-fang the union that fights hardest to protect its members’ workplace safety and conditions.

Soon after being launched, the ruling class’ slander campaign mixed in their accusations of “corruption” and “criminal links” with claims of CFMEU “violence” and “intimidation”. However, these are two completely different things! If CFMEU members are using intimidation of non-union workers to enforce strikes and strengthen the union then that is completely necessary to defend workers rights. The capitalist bosses have great power through their power to hire and fire almost at will, through their massive wealth, through the governments that serve them, through the cops, courts and commissions of their state and through the media that they own. Against them, workers are powerless as individuals. Our only power comes through collective action. And against cowardly workers who buckle under the bosses’ pressure, unionists need to enforce the workers’ collective stance – sometimes by spirited means – for the benefit of all workers. It is just like stopping scabs trying to cross a picket line – if we don’t do this we lose! It turns out too that many of the accusations of “violence” and “intimidation” against the CFMEU are about delegates and organisers firmly standing up to construction and labour hire bosses. Well, if that is true, they are doing what union officials ought to do! If they fail to do this, greedy bosses will slash safety and more workers will get killed. Workers will get exploited even more. The real problem with our union movement is that our pro-ALP leadership are not “intimidating” the greedy exploiters consistently enough – especially through the main means of “intimidation” that we have available, which is strike action. Against the powerful capitalists, our unions must resist by any means necessary!

The ALP Has Always
Stabbed the Working Class in the Back

Australia’s capitalist ruling class and the regime serving them have been preparing this onslaught for a long time. In 2005, the right-wing Howard government introduced the draconian Office of the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner to repress struggles for workers rights, impede union access to workplaces and attack the CFMEU. This body was given authoritarian, star chamber powers. The first Rudd ALP government disgustingly maintained this body and the Gillard government only later weakened it slightly when it established a revised version in 2012. The final version, the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) was abolished in 2023 but the Albanese government remained committed to gutting the CFMEU.

In September 2021, far-right factions serving the ruling class dramatically escalated the capitalist rulers’ war against the CFMEU. Egged on by the right-wing media, Australian white supremacist fascists, far-right anti-vaxxers, supporters of the ultra-right-wing Libertarian Party (then called the Liberal Democratic Party), some self-employed contractors who are CFMEU members and a few dozen ultra-right-wing construction workers – many of whom are supporters of the Croatian fascist Ustasha movement – violently attacked the CFMEU’s Melbourne office in opposition to COVID vaccine requirements and mask mandates. Ranting against communism and vaccines and hailing the Nazi-aligned Ustasha’s losing World War II war against Marshall Tito’s Yugoslav communist partisans, the far-right mob pelted and assaulted CFMEU rank and file members, delegates and officials who were defending the office. This right-wing attack intimidated union activists and caused divisions within the union. By softening up the CFMEU, that September 2021 assault has done much to prepare today’s full throttle attack on the union. CFMEU members – and their many supporters – furious about the government’s current takeover of their union should never forget this. We should deal with those who took part in – and supported – the September 2021, fascist-driven attack on the union in the appropriate way!

The spearhead of this latest and biggest onslaught against the CFMEU was the Channel 9 TV station and newspapers owned by the Nine Entertainment group, whose biggest shareholder is right-wing Australian billionaire, Bruce Gordon. Then all the right-wing forces joined in: Peter Dutton’s conservative Coalition, right-wing “independent” Jacqui Lambie and the far-right parties. The most extreme has been Pauline Hanson’s racist One Nation Party which denounces CFMEU members as “criminals” and “thugs”. Yet the present takeover of the CFMEU by the bosses’ regime would not be possible without the ALP’s support for it. Due to its current leadership of the workers movement through the ACTU bureaucrats, the ALP tops feel confident to launch brazen attacks on the working class that a conservative government would not dare attempt. Let’s not forget that the previous attack on the union movement of this scale, the mid-1980s deregistration of the militant Builders Labourers Federation, was also conducted by a Labor government (the Hawke-Keating government). Indeed, when they are worried about facing working-class resistance, the capitalist exploiters actually prefer having a Labor government in office, because they think that they can do a better job of keeping workers obedient than the openly anti-working class Liberals. Thus, during the mid-1980s, powerful media tycoons Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch supported the Hawke-Keating ALP government and in the 2007 federal elections, the Murdoch newspapers backed Kevin Rudd.

Therefore, we in Trotskyist Platform are not at all surprised by the Albanese government’s assault against the CFMEU. At the last federal elections, we opposed any support – either directly or through preferences – to the ALP or indeed to any of the other parties currently in parliament. As we stated in our pre-election statement:

“The Labor Party (ALP) `alternative’ is hell bent on proving to the big business owners, the people who really hold the power here, that an ALP administration will enforce capitalist interests as reliably as the Coalition does. Albanese’s ALP even proclaimed that a Labor government will not increase the paltry JobSeeker payments. So, at the upcoming elections, no vote should be given to either the Coalition or the ALP and Greens `alternatives’ and obviously not to the racist One Nation or the other nationalist far-right outfits like the United Australia Party. Instead, we need hard-fought strikes and other mass actions by the workers movement and its allies to turn back the capitalists’ exploitation of workers, to resist their oppression of Aboriginal people, women and coloured ethnic communities and to oppose their regime’s military buildup. The more that the working class understands that their position will not be advanced through supporting any of the current parliamentary parties, the more determined they will be to build the mass struggles needed.”

However, this kind of stance was rejected by most of the rest of the Far Left. They instead, either directly, or through preferences, called for a vote for Albanese’s ALP. Even after the elections, some on the Far Left continued to express critical support for the Albanese government. Thus a month after the Albanese government took over, the Communist Party of Australia’s National President sent a letter to the prime minister expressing warm solidarity with the new government and praising his government’s stance on a number of issues, while politely urging him to take a more progressive stance on others. However, authentic communists were never in any doubt that this is a capitalist bosses government running a bosses state. Although the ALP is a party whose base is made up of workers, its agenda and leadership have always upheld the political order that serves the capitalist big end of town. The strategy that the ALP offers workers is to try and win some gains for working class people within this anti-working class system by winning and retaining government office. To do so, it ensures that its demands for workers are so restricted as to avoid annoying the big end of town and their state institutions enough for them to oppose the election of a Labor government or undermine one that already exists. That means, Labor governments uphold the capitalists’ interests on all the issues of greatest concern to them, which today includes: maintaining anti-strike laws, allowing Australian mining tycoons to continue to plunder billions in profit from stolen Aboriginal land without having to share it with this country’s people, maintaining a pro-speculators housing policy, supporting the rape of the South West Pacific and Southeast Asia by Australian corporations, rabidly participating in the new Cold War drive to crush socialistic rule in China and … pulling the teeth out of the CFMEU! Yet, it is simply impossible to implement the capitalists’ agenda on all major questions while simultaneously improving working class people’s rights. The interests of the capitalist exploiters and those of working class people are completely counterposed. That is why to working class people who fall for Labor’s promises, new ALP governments are greeted with hopes that “this time they will be a real Labor government”, always followed, a few months later, by abject disappointment and mythical nostalgia that “Labor used to be much better”. But the truth is that ALP governments have always disappointed their working class base and have always betrayed workers’ interests. ALP leaders have always been class traitors. They did not just start last month! If the ALP today is more openly attacking workers’ rights and more brazenly right wing than it was, say, five decades ago, it is only because the capitalist ruling class is today less willing to grant even the slightest concession to the masses because their capitalist system is today in a more advanced state of decay. Understanding all this, we authentic communists headlined our article analysing the then new Albanese government: “Like the Deposed, Much Hated, Right-Wing Morrison Government, Albanese Heads an Administration Serving the Capitalist Exploiters. His Majesty’s Labor Government Marches the Same Path as Her Majesty’s Liberal Government … Only With Less Odious Regalia”.

Junk the ALP and ACTU Leaders …
And Never Let These Class Traitors Back!

The Labor government would not have tried to push through this regime takeover of the CFMEU if they did not know that they had the support of the pro-ALP, ACTU bureaucrats. That Sally McManus and the other ACTU leaders are supporting this attack on the CFMEU proves that they are as much traitors to the working class as their ALP parliamentary mates. However, this despicable treachery has caused outrage within union ranks and even parts of the ALP’s ranks. We need to leverage this to urgently loosen the influence of both the ALP and the ACTU tops. This is needed to not only reduce their ability to prevent the rest of the working class from coming to the defence of the CFMEU but to stop them holding back working class, anti-capitalist resistance more generally. In response to the ALP government appointing an administrator to take over the CFMEU, the ETU will stop all political donations to the ALP for the next federal election. This is a good first step. But they must go further. We call on militant union members – beginning with members of those unions that have openly stated solidarity with the CFMEU like the ETU, UFF, CEPU and MUA – to demand that their leaders completely dump their union’s affiliation to the ALP.

We welcome the CEPU’s decision to split with the ACTU in solidarity with the CFMEU. The ETU Executive has also resolved to stop paying affiliation fees to the ACTU while the CFMEU remains suspended from the organisation. We say that they must now take the next step too. We call on those unions that have stated solidarity with the CFMEU to follow the lead of the CEPU and break with the ACTU.

In rightly junking the ACTU, the CEPU has criticised the ACTU for only representing white collar workers and talked about establishing a blue-collar worker rival to the ACTU. But that misses the point! In stabbing the CFMEU in the back and thereby weakening the entire union movement and emboldening all the capitalists, the ACTU are betraying white collar workers as much as they are their blue collar counterparts. Moreover, the ACTU tops’ loyalty to the ALP, its strategy of collaboration with the capitalist exploiters and its subordination of workers rights to the “national interest” has led to a big increase in the rate of exploitation of workers, a surge in workforce casualisation, a deterioration in union strength and a marked reduction in workplace rights for workers and our unions over the last four decades. This has hurt workers in all types of industries. The truth is that no matter what collar shirt a worker physically and/or mentally toiling for wages wears to work, the capitalist bosses are exploiting us and the ACTU leaders are selling us out. What we need is not division in the union movement over the type of industries that workers are employed in but a union movement reinvigorated on a new, militant strategy. That means dumping the ACTU traitors and building a new leadership of the workers movement on an agenda that says: “The capitalists have been waging class war on us for the last more than four decades. We are no longer going to beg them to stop. Instead we will be mobilising all our ranks to wage full-on class war against this exploiting class.” Such a new militant union leadership must be linked to a new workers party that would advocate for the new class-struggle agenda amongst all the masses and defend it on the ideological battlefield.

Such a militant workers party is not going to come from a revamped ALP. Many in the workers movement still cling to the idea of making the ALP “truly stand up for workers”. But what we have with this current Labor government, led by so-called “Labor Left” Albanese, is just about the “best” that one can expect from an ALP government in today’s world. In the era of rapid decay of capitalism, the social democratic/ALP strategy, of restricting worker demands to what the capitalists will grudgingly tolerate, can “deliver” little more for workers than what Albanese and Co. are “offering”. Which is nothing good at all! As a means to improve workers’ lives, the ALP social democratic project is dead. Let us not try to revive it! Instead we need to bury Laborism as fast as possible!

For a New Workers Party to Lead
Class War Against the Capitalist Exploiting Class!

With the ALP selling out workers so blatantly, some workers are looking to the Greens. But let’s not forget, the Greens also fed into the anti-CFMEU propaganda surrounding the Albanese government’s placing of the union into administration. To be sure, the Greens ended up voting against the ALP’s anti-CFMEU laws and some Greens MPs are trying to leverage this to gain workers’ votes. However, the Greens made clear that their No vote was only because the ALP chose not to negotiate with them to get the bills pushed through the Senate and instead did a deal with the Liberals that made the laws even more extreme. Indeed, Greens leader Adam Bandt openly stated that the Greens were in principle willing to support the anti-CFMEU laws: “The Greens told the government we were prepared to negotiate on the legislation and seek to address some of the serious concerns in the bill, but instead Labor has worked with the anti-union, anti-worker Liberals.”

For the Greens are ultimately a party representing the capitalist class – albeit its liberal-“progressive” wing. This is proven by the fact that the Greens accept the capitalist order, refuse to even claim to be a party that stands for workers as distinct from the capitalists and include actual big-time capitalist exploiters within their ranks. In the lead-up to the last federal elections, the Greens received tens of thousands of dollars from the pastoral companies owned by the filthy rich capitalist Langenhoven family, thousands more from Australia’s fifth richest person – greedy billionaire Scott Farquhar – and over a half a million dollars from capitalist investor, Duncan Turpie. To be sure, because the ALP’s craven loyalty to the capitalist class has meant that the Greens have sometimes taken positions that are less hostile to the working class, some left-leaning workers have now thrown their support behind the Greens. However, such lash ups involving outright capitalists and pro-capitalist upper-middle class elements in the same organisation as some worker activists and leftist youth are inevitably held together on the lowest common denominator: it is the usually the worker activists and other more left-leaning Greens who end up having to compromise to keep the party together. That is why when the ALP and the Greens were in a de facto coalition administering this country from mid 2010 to early 2013, they did almost nothing for working class people, maintained the original version of the hated ABCC for much of this period and then later converted it into a still anti-union ABCC-lite type body.   

Whereas the ALP are the traitors to the working class from within the movement, the Greens are a party whose agenda kneels to the “nice” bosses within the party. But every class-conscious worker knows that when their need for profit truly demands it, the “nice” bosses will attack workers rights as ruthlessly as the rabidly anti-worker ones will – only that the latter will laugh at your face when they retrench hundreds of workers while the “nice” bosses will be apologetic and teary when they do exactly the same thing. Thus, if the on-going dumping of the ALP ends up in increased worker support for the Greens it will not at all be a step forward for the workers movement. Indeed, if anything it will be a step backwards for workers’ political consciousness, because it represents a rejection of the need for workers to have our own party separate from the capitalists who exploit us. Workers who give their allegiance to the Greens will now be putting their faith in a party politically dominated by a section of the capitalist class – albeit the “progressive” exploiters.

The ongoing break of some sections of the workers movement with the ALP will only have an unambiguously positive significance if it results in the building of a new workers’ party that is committed to fighting for what workers actually need and not limiting our demands to what the bosses will concede without excessively antagonising them. Such a party would understand that improvements in workers’ lives are not going to come through gaining parliamentary office and making reforms in the interests of workers. This truth can be hard for some to accept. After all, it would be a lot easier if we could defend workers rights by simply getting the correct party elected at an election and wait for them to do the rest in parliament. However, given the enormous power of the capitalist class, this will never happen. History has proven that such a parliamentary-based strategy for workers rights simply does not work. For the state institutions – from the courts, to the various commissions, to the police, to the upper ranks of the bureaucracy and to the military – that any government in a capitalist country administers are themselves tied to the filthy rich capitalist owners by millions of threads. And those governments are in any case beholden to the control that the capitalists have over the economy and the capitalists’ ability to utilise their enormous wealth to swing “public opinion”. That is why every significant gain that the working class has ever won has been a result of industrial action, other mass struggles, or the fear put in the hearts of the capitalist exploiters by revolutionary workers’ victories abroad. When capitalist parliaments or courts have instituted some pro-worker measures this is only ever a codification of struggles actually won by workers in the arena of mass struggle, or a concession to working class political agitation that threatens to incite such struggle. The new workers party that we need must be a party dedicated to organising such militant class struggle and mobilising the entire working class and big chunks of the broader masses behind the class-struggle agenda.

The Need for All-Sided Resistance
Against the Capitalist Ruling Class

The new workers party that we must urgently build would unite defence of the CFMEU with struggles for what all sections of the working class and other oppressed groups need. It would fight for big across-the-board wage hikes to make up for the plummeting real wages that workers have copped over the last few years. It would fight for the immediate conversion of all gig and other casual jobs into secure, ongoing ones with all the rights of permanency. To relieve the suffering of huge numbers of low-income renters, it would demand both a massive increase in public housing and the confiscation of the vacant homes of the ultra-rich and their transfer into public hands. Such a party would actively join with the hundreds of thousands of people in this country who have participated in marches over the last ten months against the Australian bosses’ regime’s participation in the U.S./Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. It would support the struggles for liberation of the brutally oppressed Aboriginal people who are being targeted by the very same media, the same police and the same ruling class that have been attacking the CFMEU. The party would fight to mobilise workers’ action to deter Australian regime authorities from killing Aboriginal people in custody, stealing Aboriginal children from their families and imposing discriminatory laws that target Aboriginal people – like compulsory income management rules and curfews in heavily black areas.

The workers party that we need would also make a point of standing with migrants – especially those from non-European heritage – against the ruling-class politicians and mainstream media blaming them for every problem and against violent attacks and intimidation by racist rednecks. Such a party would point out that today’s assault on the CFMEU is being conducted by the same ruling class that is determined to scapegoat immigration for the suffering that their capitalist system causes. Opposing racist scapegoating of people of colour is especially crucial because any racial divisions within the workers movement undermines workers’ ability to unite in struggle against the union-busting ruling class. In the CFMEU, in particular, there are many workers of Maori, other Pacific Islander, Asian, Middle Eastern and African backgrounds. Racist scapegoating and racist attacks often have the effect of intimidating people of colour and making people of Asian, African, Middle Eastern and Islander backgrounds feel more isolated and more wary of putting their heads up in struggles than they otherwise would. So a true workers party would mobilise mass action uniting workers and people of colour to smash any racist provocation by far-right white supremacist groups. This would send a message to the more numerous garden-variety racists out there that they had better pull their heads in. Moreover, in carrying out such action, we will not only be getting revenge for the Melbourne far-right attack on the CFMEU in September 2021 but would be standing on the traditions of a very proud moment in CFMEU history: when a large group of CFMEU construction workers formed the vanguard of a hundreds strong anti-fascist mobilisation that drove the white supremacist Australia First Party off the streets of Brisbane on 2 May 2014.

The militant workers party and new union leadership that must be built would also demand the granting of full citizenship rights to all migrants working here. This would make it much easier for workers with insecure residency status to stand up to their bosses. It would also facilitate, for example, the CFMEU organising into the union the many isolated Afghan, Korean and Chinese background workers working in areas like plastering and tiling. A workers party and union movement that strongly defends the rights of migrants and uncompromisingly wages war against racist attacks will then be boosted by the fact that working class people from Asian, African, Middle Eastern and Pacific Islander backgrounds will become the most energetic and loyal supporters of workers’ struggles and union picket lines – as these workers often are even today.

A genuine workers party must also champion the cause of women workers and women’s rights. Women workers are especially hard hit by casualisation and low-income single mothers are especially suffering from the rental affordability crisis. We must demand equal pay for women workers. We must also make it easier for women to leave violent partners through the fight for a massive increase in both the number of free women’s shelter places and the amount of low-rent public housing. Right now, there is an added urgency to fighting for such an agenda. To facilitate their attack on the militant CFMEU, the ruling class and their servants in the ALP and the ACTU leadership are hurling accusations about “misogyny” within the CFMEU. The people making these accusations do not truly care about women’s rights one bit! Let’s recall what happened in April when Albanese drove to tears a woman survivor of misogynist violence, Sarah Williams, when he arrogantly made a lying swipe against her and other organisers of a tens of thousands strong rally against gender-based violence against women, when he took the microphone after being heckled by attendees. Yet to justify their campaign against militant unions, Albanese and the other enemies of the working class have been able to point to some real male chauvinism that does exist within parts of the CFMEU leadership. That it is even worse within the ALP, within the notoriously male chauvinist conservative parties and within the corporate board rooms does not absolve the need for an uncompromising political struggle within the workers movement to root out any instances of male chauvinism. Most importantly, the new militant union leadership and workers party that we must build must mobilise the mass of workers behind the struggle for women’s emancipation. If they do, women workers – many of whom are already the most strike-happy workers in the country – will surely be in the forefront of the class-struggle fightback that we desperately need.

Let’s Not Bow to the Mythical “National Interest” –
Let’s Fight for Working-Class Rule Instead!

Many of the union officials who are rightly opposing the CFMEU being forced into administration have described the attack as “unAustralian” or “not how we do the rule of law in Australia”. However, the fact is that this attack on the CFMEU is all too typical of the way that the Australian capitalist class and their ALP lackeys deal with militant unions that dare to struggle. In 1949, the then Chifley ALP government actually unleashed troops to smash the huge NSW coal miners’ strike. Then Chifley’s conservative successor, Robert Menzies, unleashed the military against striking seamen and waterfront workers several times, including against a 1953 waterfront workers strike in the Queensland port of Bowen. In 1981, Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser used the RAAF to scab on the 1981 Qantas workers strike. Eight years later, the Hawke Labor government did the same to smash the pilots’ strike. Then in late 1997, one Australian stevedoring company assembled current and former Australian SAS troops and commandos to be trained to take over the wharves as scab labour. A few months later, Australian-owned Patrick Corporation, backed by the then Howard Liberal-National government, sent in balaclava-wearing security guards, attack dogs and scabs to the wharves to lock out workers and operate the wharves with scabs. Talk about “violence” and “intimidation”! Such aggressive union-busting is indeed the way that the Australian capitalist class does “the rule of law in Australia”. As far as Australia’s greedy capitalist ruling class is concerned: forcing the CFMEU into administration is very Australian! And here is the point: there are no common “national values”, “national way of doing things” or indeed “national interest” between, on the one hand, the working class and most middle class people and, on the other, the capitalist exploiting class. Our interests are completely counterposed. Let us be aware, that it is in good part in the name of the “national interest” that the capitalist class is waging war on the CFMEU. For as long as the capitalist class rules Australia, the “national interest” will always mean their interest. It is in the name of serving the “national interest” that one Labor government after another has been selling out workers. Therefore, the new union leadership and workers party that we must build must explicitly reject subordinating itself to the “national interest”. It must instead stand proudly for the class interests of working class people and their allies, which are synonymous with the interests of all workers of the world.

In mobilising militant action for what workers need, our enemies will counter that this will lead business owners to stop hiring and stop investing. That is actually true – but only if we let them continue to run the economy. Therefore, in fighting for workers rights, we must also fight for measures to ban profitable companies from laying off workers and measures to, instead, force them to increase hiring of permanent employees at the expense of their own profits. We must combine such demands with a program to confiscate key sectors of the economy from the capitalists for transfer into public hands – including the banks, the mining companies, the energy resource and power industries and the medical service, aged care and childcare sectors. To secure such gains and open the road to the full liberation of the working class and all of the oppressed, our end goal must be the sweeping away of this existing capitalist state and the construction of a new workers state to run an economy dominated by public ownership. This means that the new workers party that we need must be a revolutionary party committed to this goal. And when the enemies of the working class say that such a socialist system “does not work” and “look at China”, this party will respond:

“When your media that vilifies militant unions demonises socialistic China, we do not believe them one bit. Although China’s socialism is quite unfinished and deformed by intense hostile pressure from the capitalist world and although her leaders are not perfect (somewhat like the leaders of our unions), her socialistic system, in which her key economic sectors are under public ownership, has brought immense benefits to her working class masses. China has lifted all her people out of extreme poverty, has a high percentage of her people living in low-cost or low rent public housing and has a much lower proportion of homeless people than we do here – despite still being a poorer country overall.  Socialistic China has also achieved, by a huge margin, the fastest rate of real wage growth in the world. In socialistic China, workers’ real wages have tripled in the last fifteen years! So socialism, in even a distorted and incomplete form, works. Unlike in China, a future workers state in Australia will not be burdened by the difficult task of having to lift the whole country up from extreme poverty in the way that the Chinese workers state had to lift her people out of the terrible poverty of China’s pre-1949 capitalist, imperialist-subjugated days. And through our future workers revolutions in Australia and other developed countries, we will join hands with China to advance both our socialist causes and bring the full complementarity of our economies together for the benefit of all our peoples and all the peoples of the world. On the one hand, this will ensure that the Chinese advanced guard in the struggle for socialism can reach its final destination. On the other, it will enable Australia’s masses to no longer be burdened by having such a huge part of our resources being diverted into long-range missiles, nuclear submarines and other weapons being procured to attack a workers state.”

Sisters and brothers, the capitalist ruling class and the class traitors heading the ALP and the ACTU think that they have scored a decisive big victory in forcing the CFMEU into administration. But there is massive anger at this amongst working class people. Out of adversity, let us rise in militant struggle to smash this attack on the CFMEU and make the enemy regret that they ever launched it. Let’s not only kick the administrators out of the CFMEU but use this as an opportunity to get rid of all the anti-strike laws and all the laws restricting union access to workplaces. And let’s seize on the exposure of the ALP and ACTU leadership’s true nature to build a new militant leadership of the union movement linked to a revolutionary, internationalist workers party. Let’s advance these goals by building an indefinite national construction workers strike backed by solidarity strikes in other industries! Let’s then build mass picket lines to stop scabbing on this strike; and to enable the huge numbers of other working class people and workers’ allies to unleash their support for the CFMEU!