Australian elections | Trotskyist Platform

Photo Above: Trotskyist Platform editor, Yuri Gromov emcee’s a 15 June 2024 rally protesting against unaffordable rents in Australia. This demonstration in central Sydney called for expanding the supply of low-rent public housing through confiscating the vacant houses of the ultra-rich.

21 February 2025 – Rents are crushing working class people in Australia. Even in Western Sydney’s Auburn, the median asking rent for two bedroom units is now $600 per week. That is two-thirds of what a worker on the minimum wage gets if they are lucky enough to have a full-time job! No wonder millions are skipping meals to pay rent. The shortage of low-rent housing is caused by developers and rich investors who know that they can extract more money building homes that can be sold for high prices rather than providing homes with rents affordable by lower income people. Look at Paddington’s Selywn Street. There a developer who bought boarding houses that housed 32 people is evicting elderly tenants so that he can turn the place into luxury units intended for just eight people. This is the capitalist “free market” at work!

That is why we need more low-rent public housing. But state and federal governments of all stripes have instead been selling off public housing. We must reverse this! Let’s stop all sell-offs of public housing! Let’s also resist any moves by developers to turn low-rent boarding houses into higher-cost accommodation. Instead, let’s actively fight for a massive increase in public housing!

The rental crisis would be over if we turned this country’s one million vacant dwellings into low-rent public housing. Many of these dwellings are the ultra-rich’s holiday homes or homes that they hold for speculation. We demand that any dwelling that is unoccupied for more than two months of a year and which is owned by people with more than five million dollars of property assets be confiscated and turned into public housing. The ruling class say that such methods are not economically “rational”. But that is a lie! For in the country with the world’s fastest growing economy, China, they are increasing public housing and curbing speculation. So in China’s biggest cities, Shanghai and Beijing, families are banned from owning more than two homes. Instead of privatising housing, China is doing the very opposite. Governments and state-owned firms there are aggressively buying up private housing and converting it into low-rent public housing. Through such policies, about 25% of homes in their cities are public housing – ten times the ratio as in Australia. No wonder the proportion of homeless people in China is much lower than here! We demand that the government here, instead of always attacking China – just because her toiling classes dared to take over that country in a 1949 revolution – start applying China-style, pro-worker housing policies in Australia.

China can provide abundant public housing because under her socialistic system not only are key developers state-owned but so are her most profitable sectors. These provide the funds for public housing, cheap education and other programs to meet the real needs of youth and the elderly. We badly need to seize the most lucrative sectors here too and put them into public hands – starting with mining! Over the last year, gross profits in the Australian mining sector were more than $224 billion (!!) – much of it going to local billionaires like Gina Rinehart, Andrew Forrest and Clive Palmer. That’s 27 times the combined amount that all Australian states spend on all forms of social housing!

But who will implement the measures that we need? The ALP’s “affordable housing” pledges are so paltry that they don’t even meet the new additional demand for low-rent homes. Meanwhile, the Liberals hate public ownership while the far-right parties are downright hostile to public tenants. The Greens do promise more public housing. But most of their promises are not for public housing but for “affordable housing” that involves subsidising landlords; or for privately run “community” housing. Moreover, because the Greens must accommodate their capitalist and many upper-middle class members, they never deliver on their better promises. When they were in coalition with Labor in government in Tasmania and federally from 2010, they were complicit in undermining public housing. So we cannot rely on any of the parties currently in parliament. Instead, we need industrial action, occupations of vacant homes of the ultra-rich and other mass actions to force the rulers to accede to our demands. Let’s build these struggles by uniting the fight for public housing with the struggle to reverse the plunge in real wages and the fight to throw back Albanese’s attack on the CFMEU union. The more that working class people realise that nothing good will come from voting for any of the current parliamentary parties, the more that they will join the struggles that we need regardless of who wins the next election. So, convince your friends not to vote for any of the parties now in parliament! And fight to build the strikes, occupations and rallies necessary to win what the masses need and the organisation needed to promote such resistance.

To build this resistance, we must oppose the ruling elite’s campaign to blame migrants and foreign buyers for high rents. Migration has absolutely zero to do with the high rents and foreign investment very little. Migrants live in homes but build them and pay taxes too. The fastest rate of rent rises was in 2021, when there was no migration whatsoever (due to the pandemic)! And foreign purchasers buy just 1% of all homes! Let’s expose these truths so that we can defeat all attempts to divide us by the rich capitalists who truly cause the rental crisis! We must also demand that all visa workers, refugees and overseas students be granted the rights of citizenship so that they can feel confident enough to join in the mass struggles that we all need.

Let’s smash anything that harms the struggles that we need to increase the supply of low-rent housing and advance workers rights! Fight for a huge increase in public housing! Fight to transfer the vacant houses of the ultra-rich into public hands!

**6 August 2017, Millers Point, Sydney:** Houses in High St occupied by trade unionists, current and former public housing tenants and other supporters of public housing. The occupation demanded that these vacant public housing dwellings be made available to those on the public housing waiting list or the homeless. That powerful struggle gives a taste of the kind of action we need today to win a massive increase in public housing and the confiscation of the vacant homes of the ultra-rich.

Housing-Feb-2025 Download

Photo above: Sydney bus drivers picket during their December 2021 strike action against poor wages and conditions following privatisation.
Photo credit: AAP

None of the Current Parliamentary Parties
Defend Workers’ Interests

FOR MILITANT CLASS STRUGGLE
AGAINST AUSTRALIA’S CAPITALISTS!

Capitalist Rulers’ Hostility to China is Due to Their Hatred
of Her Public Ownership-Based System

STAND WITH SOCIALISTIC CHINA TO
STAND FOR WORKING CLASS INTERESTS!

25 April 2022: Working class people are sick of the Morrison government. They are angry that while their rich bosses are looting ever greater profits, their own wages are barely rising, even while prices skyrocket. Many young people, women and migrant workers in particular are frustrated that they are stuck in casual positions with no job security. Meanwhile, Aboriginal people and Asian, African and Middle Eastern communities can’t help but notice that nine years of right- wing government has seen Australian society become even more racist and hostile towards them.

Yet 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.

THE DEAD END OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY’S APPROACH TO
“SUPPORTING” WORKERS RIGHTS

The ALP does raise issues of concern to the masses. The problem is that because ALP leaders are so in awe of the economic power and capacity to swing public opinion of the tycoons (the likes of the Murdochs, the Lowys, Kerry Stokes, Andrew Forrest, Gina Rinehart, Anthony Pratt and Bruce Gordon), the ALP does not dare anger these oligarchs by even merely promising the measures actually needed. Thus, the ALP’s rental affordability plan will not increase badly needed public housing but rather promises funds for just a modest increase in “community housing”, notorious for its private operators who skimp on repairs and shun the most hard-up would-be tenants. Similarly, even as the ALP promises higher wages and secure jobs they commit to maintaining nearly all the anti-strike laws that restrict workers ability to fight for these needs.

With no program to secure jobs through struggle against the bosses, the ALP resorts to policies favouring procurement (ie buying) from businesses owned by local capitalists. Such measures will inevitably provoke countermeasures by trade partners overseas to favour their own firms over Australian exporters. In the end, rival protectionist schemes end up with workers in no country better off. What they do “achieve” is to make workers mistakenly side with the interests of the very local bosses that exploit them. This harms the building of union resistance against the bosses. Moreover, such protectionist agendas set local workers against their counterparts abroad. This is totally against what the 1st of May international workers day is based on: the truth that only by fighting as one worldwide class can the interests of workers everywhere be advanced.

The ALP kowtows to the capitalists most cravenly on external issues. Thus, the ALP backs Morrison’s anti-China military buildup. ALP leaders even criticise him from the right for not bullying enough the Solomon Islands into renouncing their security cooperation with China. In backing the Western imperialists’ Cold War against socialistic China, the ALP is acting completely against the interests of its working class base. Mutually beneficial cooperation between China’s state-owned firms and countries like PNG, Fiji, Solomon Islands and East Timor has allowed Pacific peoples to gain more independence from the Australian capitalists that have long looted their resources. This has enraged the corporate bigwigs here because it has made them lose some of the super profits that they were looting in the Pacific. Yet this is good news for the working class as it weakens the bosses of Australian multinationals and makes them less able to face down union action here. Similarly, while Western capitalists are terrified that the successes of China’s socialistic system will inspire workers in their own countries to fight against capitalism, any true partisan of the toilers should want precisely such “Chinese influence” here in Australia.

PROMOTING THE GREENS MEANS OBSTRUCTING
THE CONSTRUCTION OF WORKING CLASS RESISTANCE

Given how similar Labor’s agenda is to the Liberals, some support the Greens. They do promise some progressive policies like increasing public housing. However, to implement such reforms, let alone any decisive anti-poverty measures, requires defying the capitalists. The Greens cannot do this because they reject a class struggle outlook. In fact, the Greens actually embrace capitalists in their party. Thereby lacking both the will and ability to confront capitalist power, any Greens MPs in government will inevitably bend to the demands of the powerful capitalists. In the early 2010s, when The Greens ran Tasmania alongside Labor, they cut nursing positions and public housing repairs. Today, they are part of the capitalist class’ drive to strangle socialistic China. Indeed, while opposing the nuclear submarine plans, The Greens are even more rabid than the Liberals in spewing the lying “human rights” attacks on China that “rationalises” such military escalation.

Despite this, The Greens are backed by parts of the Left – such as the Socialist Alliance. After all, such reformist socialists share not only The Greens’ better positions but many of its worst ones; such as their support for anti-communists attacking the Chinese workers state – like the pro-colonial, rich kid rioters in Hong Kong. Pro-Greens socialists do acknowledge The Greens’ capitalist essence. However, they say we need to “support the lesser evil.” Yet, backing The Greens actually means supporting another form of the same evil – the tyranny of the capitalists. Moreover, those advocating a vote for The Greens are undermining class struggle by promoting the false notion that a wing of the capitalists – represented by The Greens – can aid the workers’ cause. This is as harmful to the building of militant unions as the idea sometimes heard in workplaces that workers should focus on helping supposed “nicer” managers rise to become the head henchmen of their firm’s exploiters.

LET’S BUILD A PARTY TO ORGANISE MILITANT CLASS STRUGGLE
RESISTANCE AGAINST THE CAPITALIST EXPLOITERS

The current mass workers party, the ALP, is selling out its base. But we still need a workers party! But completely unlike the ALP, it should be built to organise class struggle against the capitalist ruling class. Recent nurses and transport strikes show the potential for such resistance. However, the current pro-ALP union leaders see such actions as supplementary to the parliamentary game. The new workers party must have the inverse perspective: class struggle is its main game. Such a party would not limit its program to what the capitalists can accept but will doggedly fight for what the masses actually need: big wage rises, a huge increase in the dole, the conversion of all casual jobs into ones with all the rights of permanency and the abolition of anti-strike laws. It would struggle for a massive increase in public housing and completely free medical and dental care. It would champion the cause of oppressed women workers through demanding equal pay and free childcare.

To be able to win in struggle against the powerful capitalists, the workers movement must draw alongside it all the oppressed by standing with the Aboriginal people’s struggle against racist state terror, by championing women’s rights and LGBTQI+ rights and by defending persecuted ethnic minorities. Our side also needs maximum unity to win. That means anything that undermines workers unity like protectionism and the scapegoating of migrants must be rejected. The working class and our unions must demand all the rights of citizenship for all refugees, guest workers and international students.

Whenever we demand decent wages and job security, the bosses threaten that this will cause job losses. We must respond by demanding the banning of all job cuts by any firm making a profit and laws to force them to increase their hiring at the expense of their profits. When they scream that this will cause economic collapse, the new workers party would respond: if your system cannot provide secure jobs for all then the economy needs to be immediately ripped from your hands and brought into socialist, state ownership under a state run by the workers. The workers party that we need must be a revolutionary party.

Advancing towards the overturn of capitalism requires defending already achieved anti-capitalist conquests. That means defending the Chinese workers state – despite its bureaucratic deformations – that was created by the Chinese toilers through their 1949 anti-capitalist revolution. So down with the lying propaganda war against socialistic China! Australia’s imperialist rulers: Hands off the Pacific! Down with the anti-China AUKUS alliance! Not one submarine, not one missile, not one soldier for the Australian military – a force that only serves the interests of Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer, Andrew Forrest and their ilk.

Western rulers’ hostility to Russia is of a very different character to their enmity to Red China because Russia is a capitalist country just like them. But their anti-Russia campaign is aimed at suppressing an emerging competitor so that they can continue to exclusively dominate and exploit most of the world’s peoples. If their campaign succeeds it will embolden them to further attack the rights of workers and other oppressed at home and bully still more arrogantly the people of the Pacific. So down with U.S., Australian and other Western arms shipments to Ukraine! Lift all sanctions on Russia!

The way that the U.S. and its allies provoked the Ukraine War and then pour oil onto an already burning conflict that pits their ally against their rival nuclear power shows just how dangerous the Western capitalist rulers really are. These rulers could not protect “their” vulnerable populations from the terrible COVID carnage. What chance do they have then of making an effective response to the threat posed by climate change?! More immediately, rampant inflation in their countries is threatening a new global capitalist crisis that will impoverish billions – just like the late noughties Great Recession did.

With every passing day, the urgency of opposing the capitalist “order” becomes ever clearer. However, the masses are held back by the mainstream consensus that privatisation, submission to the tycoons and suppression of wage rises are what is needed. However, events in the world’s most populous country are proving that things don’t have to be this way. In China, the state has been rapidly increasing wages, massively boosting public housing, forcing companies to guarantee gig workers at least the minimum wage and suppressing greedy billionaires. Far from privatising, the Chinese state has maintained public ownership of banking, ports, major construction and all other key sectors. And despite an incomplete transition to socialism, their system works. Let us be inspired by this to resist the class war that the capitalists have been waging against us. They have been winning because the Laborite heads of our movement have accommodated them rather than been at the forefront of a militant resistance against the exploiters. We need to change this! Let us wage class war back against the capitalist class! Let us slash away the illusions in salvation through parliament that are restraining a truly powerful working class fightback!