Above Photo: July 2021, Southwest Sydney – Essential workers living in Sydney’s multiracial working class suburb of Fairfield queue for up to six hours just to get a COVID test.
Photo Credit: AAP
To Suppress the COVID Wave Sweeping through Sydney,
We Need to:
Bust Morrison’s Myths about Australia’s
Response to the Deadly Pandemic
2 August 2021: Yesterday, NSW announced that it had 239 new locally acquired COVID cases – the equal highest number of daily cases since the start of the pandemic. Worryingly, case numbers have soared since last week. There is a risk that the situation will spiral out of control. Even if the authorities are able to prevent a massive death toll as occurred in Melbourne last winter, it is likely that they will only be able to do this by maintaining the current lockdown for months. Some 2.3 million residents in Sydney’s working class western and southwestern suburbs are under especially strict lockdown restrictions that prevent all but essential workers from working outside their local government area. However, all the residents of Greater Sydney, the Blue Mountains, Central Coast and Wollongong have been locked down for the last more than five weeks and the lockdown is officially set to last another four more weeks. Many infectious disease experts are saying that it is unlikely that the lockdown can be lifted until well into spring. Indeed, the NSW Liberal government, having been disastrously slow to respond to the outbreak of the more infectious Delta variant, seems to have given up trying to squash the outbreak. Instead, it is merely trying to limit the speed of the spread through lockdowns while waiting for more and more people to get vaccinated and in this way for the outbreak to be eventually contained. The problem is that this strategy could take several months to bear fruit. Months in which many people will die. Months in which many others – including young people – will get long-term debilitating COVID side effects. And months in which hundreds of thousands of working class people will suffer terrible financial hardships; with those working in insecure, casual jobs once again set to be hardest hit.
So how can we dig ourselves out of the hole that federal and state governments and their system have led us into? To clarify the strategy needed, we must look at why Australia’s current response is failing and what methods have worked in certain overseas countries. However, to be able to do this we need to bust the boastful myths that prime minister, Scott Morrison, and health minister, Greg Hunt, have spread about Australia’s handling of the pandemic. And we need to dispel the myths that they have spread about the varied COVID responses in different overseas countries. Of course, it is hardly only “Scotty from Marketing” and his Liberal-National government that are at fault. Thus, although the ALP have now been calling out the Coalition government’s shambolic vaccine rollout, they have largely upheld the overall COVID response program of the right-wing government. Indeed the favourite expression in 2020 of ALP “opposition” leader, Anthony Albanese seemed to be: “we are at one with the government on this.” Meanwhile, although sections of the mainstream media have criticised Morrison’s vaccine rollout and sometimes critiqued particular measures taken by various levels of Australian government, they too have peddled the myth about Australia’s response to the pandemic being “the envy of the world”. And they have certainly joined Morrison, the ALP, the Greens and the far-right parties in looking for every opportunity to make lying attacks against the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) response to the pandemic. To better explain why the entire Australian ruling class and all the forces that uphold their rule are “at one with the government” on the fundamental questions over the pandemic response, it is necessary to pick apart each of the myths spread by the government headed by Morrison from marketing.
Myth Number 1: “Australia’s Response to COVID Leads the World”
With the Delta variant spreading dangerously through Sydney and with Greater Sydney and surrounding regions in the midst of what will be a months-long lockdown, this frequently made boast by the Morrison government is getting more infuriating every day. Moreover, it is also simply not true. It is, to be sure, true that relative to the U.S., Britain, Western European countries, Brazil, Russia and India, Australia’s response has been more successful. However, that is a very low bar to climb over! For the response to the pandemic in those countries has been catastrophically awful. Moreover, Australia is blessed with certain natural advantages that make it easier to control a pandemic. Firstly, Australia has a very low population density – 120 times lower than India’s – which obviously makes viruses transmit slower than in more densely populated countries. Moreover, Australia is an island. This makes quarantine measures easier to implement. Indeed, to the extent that Australia’s rulers have been more successful than their counterparts in some other countries in dealing with the virus threat, it is has been through implementing one of the most draconian travel restriction policies of any country in the world. Adopting a fortress strategy, the ruling class have basically banned all international travel except for allowing, at a slow pace, the return of citizens and permanent residents from abroad. However, as we are seeing with this current outbreak in Sydney and the one a year ago in Melbourne, once the virus gets through the walls of the fortress, the system here is truly tested. And it has been failing this test.
To see how much a lie it is that the Australian rulers’ response to COVID has been “number one in the world”, we only have to compare the COVID situation in Australia with that of the most populous country in the world, the PRC. Over the last five days, Australia has averaged nearly 225 local cases per day. By contrast, mainland China, a land with a population some 60 times larger than Australia, has averaged just 36 locally acquired cases per day.
It is not only in the recent period that Australia’s pandemic response compares unfavourably to China’s. Overall, the amount of people who have died from COVID per million residents is more than 11 times higher in Australia than in China. And China’s much greater success in responding to COVID can be proven even to those swayed by right-wing conspiracy theories claiming that she has under-reported her pandemic death toll. In fact, Australia’s own health data confirms how few people in China were infected with COVID. Australian data shows that of the more than 320,000 people who arrived into Australia from China (include both returning Australian citizens and residents as well as Chinese international students) in the first four months of last year – by far the worst period of the outbreak in China – only between 15 and 21 people were found to have been infected with the coronavirus. This means that in the very worst period of the pandemic in China, the average infection rate of arrivals from there – which is a good indicator of the infection rate within China itself – was many times lower than the peak infection rate of active cases within Australia.
The PRC is not the only socialistic country that has outperformed capitalist Australia in responding to the COVID threat. Laos, which has a population slightly more than Victoria’s has had just six COVID deaths throughout the entire pandemic. As well as the four socialistic countries in Asia, even dozens of capitalist countries have a lower death rate from COVID than Australia. Although largely not as successful as the Chinese, Laotian and North Korean workers states, amongst these capitalist states that have responded better than Australia include Nigeria, Niger, New Zealand, Singapore, Eritrea and Tajikistan.
So why has the response from Australia’s rulers been comparatively poor. The haphazard vaccination campaign is often mentioned. And that definitely is a factor. Less than 15% of Australia’s population is fully vaccinated (18% of people older than 16). Even among the most vulnerable section of the population, over 70s, three in five people are not yet fully vaccinated. However, the poor vaccination campaign is not the only reason for the current crisis in this country. COVID testing services are inadequate meaning that people have to wait in long queues to get tested in hotspot areas, which deters people who should be getting themselves tested from doing so. In the Fairfield area in southwest Sydney, residents have had to queue for up to six hours just to get a COVID test! Meanwhile, Australia’s rulers and their capitalist system have failed to ensure adequate protective clothing (PPE) for nurses and other healthcare workers, paramedics, hospital cleaners, aged care workers and other crucial frontline workers. As a result, throughout the pandemic, COVID has readily spread from infected patients to nurses and aged care workers or the other way around, leading then to rapid spreads among other healthcare workers, patients and aged care home residents. This is a primary cause of the carnage last winter in privately-owned aged care homes in Victoria. Moreover, in just the last month in Sydney, virus transmission between healthcare workers and patients has caused dangerous COVID clusters that have disrupted services in several major hospitals include Fairfield, Royal North Shore and Liverpool. Indeed, Australia’s latest COVID death is a man who contracted the disease while being a patient for another illness at Liverpool Hospital.
To fully appreciate all the reasons for the poor response to the COVID crisis in this country, we first need to bust a few more of the myths spread by the Morrison government, the “Opposition” and the tycoon and government-owned mainstream media.
Myth Number 2: “South Korea and Taiwan
are Countries that are Also
at the Top of the League with Australia in Terms of COVID Response”
Actually, South Korea has had even more pandemic-related deaths per million residents than here in Australia; and as we have outlined above, dozens of other countries have a lower death rate than here. Moreover, South Korea is right now in the midst of a massive COVID spread. They have averaged over 1,500 new cases per day over the last week. So Australia’s ruling class speak less about South Korea these days. But why did Australia’s ruling class want to portray South Korea as a “top of the league” success story? Praising South Korea’s response was part of their desperate attempts to find a “like-minded country” that they could highlight as a pandemic response success. They needed this mythical “success story” from a “like-minded country” as a retort to the, for them, very ugly reality that the most successful countries in responding to COVID have been the very countries most targeted by the Western imperialists’ Cold War drive against workers states: the PRC and her socialistic neighbours.
When the ruling class say “like-minded countries”, they mean other countries ruled by capitalist regimes that are allied with the U.S. and Britain. Sometimes the rulers here also point to Singapore and New Zealand as “similar COVID successes like Australia.” However, they know that people are not stupid and that most people would know that both those countries are islands with very small populations and which, therefore, have a much easier challenge dealing with COVID than other countries. Indeed, some islands with small populations like the Solomon Islands and Macao have had no pandemic-related deaths whatsoever.
Australia’s ruling class chose South Korea as a populous, capitalist, Western-allied country to be held up as a pandemic “success story”. The fact that South Korea is a frontline Cold War state who the West needs to hold up as a model relative to socialistic North Korea (DPRK – Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea) makes it an even more useful choice. Another crucial frontline Cold War ally of the Western capitalist powers is Taiwan – who the American, Australian and other “like-minded” regimes see as an unsinkable aircraft carrier aimed against Red China. An island country, Taiwan used a draconian, Morrison-style fortress approach to have early success in warding off the pandemic. Apologists for capitalism and Western domination of the world loudly celebrated. They took every opportunity to hold up as a model of pandemic response success this capitalist state of ethnic Chinese people in order to obscure the big fact that was becoming increasingly obvious to objective observers: that socialistic China was doing a sterling job in suppressing COVID. However, once Taiwan’s fortress experienced a serious breach a few months ago, her systems were found to be poor in dealing with the resulting outbreak. Taiwan’s COVID death rate soared to almost the same level as Australia’s. Therefore, just as with South Korea, the Australian ruling class and their media have stopped talking about Taiwan’s COVID response.
It is becoming impossible to ignore the elephant in the room when it comes to pandemic response success – the PRC as well as her socialistic neighbours and allies the Lao People’s Democratic Republic and the DPRK (and to a slightly lesser extent the Socialist Republic of Vietnam). And if the capitalist media here were not so blinded by their own soft-core white supremacist prejudice and “First World” arrogance they would also recognise the current achievements of several African and Central Asian countries in dealing with the pandemic – many of whom it so happens have cooperated closely with Beijing in their COVID response.
What the capitalist rulers of Australia and other “like-minded countries” are terrified about is that the masses in their own countries will see the relative success of socialistic China in dealing with the pandemic and conclude that they need socialism in their own countries too; or, at the least, conclude that they should not acquiesce to the Cold War drive against socialistic rule in China. So with the facts about the pandemic response against them, the U.S., Australian and other Western imperialists have had to resort more and more to outright lies. It is in this context that we must understand Joe Biden and Morrison’s resurrection of the discredited, Trump-era, far-right conspiracy “theory” that COVID leaked out of a Wuhan lab.
Per capita COVID-caused deaths in some of the states in the Asia-Pacific region that have not had an absolutely disastrous response to the pandemic. “Australia has been the leader of the world” in responding to COVID??? “Taiwan and South Korea are also at the top of the pack”??? Give us a break Scott Morrison, Greg Hunt and the mainstream Australian media!
Data source: Worldometer, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
Myth Number 3: “China’s COVID Response is
Based on the Use of Authoritarian Methods”
Ever since it became apparent that their own countries were going to be far less effective in dealing with the coronavirus threat than the PRC, capitalist ruling classes began spreading the above myth. Scott Morrison found one or two unverified reports of people in China using draconian methods to enforce the initial Wuhan lockdown and insinuated that this was the norm in China. The mainstream media sang the same tune. Yet the truth is very different. Of course, in a hugely populous country with one in five of the world’s entire population, one can always find a few negative stories in China about just about any issue. The reality, however, is that the Wuhan lockdown succeeded because of the voluntary co-operation of the overwhelming majority of her residents. China’s collectivist economic system in which public ownership plays the backbone role has bred a collectivist culture amongst her people. The feeling that people should make personal sacrifices for the common good out of which everyone will then benefit has been rooted deep in the hearts of the people. Moreover, trust in government is high in the PRC. Therefore, Wuhan’s lockdown was not undermined by the phenomena we have here, where far-right forces are manipulating distrust in government and middle class anger at the economic cost of lockdowns to undermine pandemic response. Moreover, any enforcement of the lockdown that was needed in Wuhan was largely performed by neighbourhood committees, volunteers from local Communist Party of China branches and public health officials. The police role there was really subsidiary. Thus, when the tiny percentage of people who snuck out of lockdown were caught out, rather than being fined, they were typically just scolded and often then simply escorted (or in very rare cases dragged) back into their homes by grass-roots activists – who were sometimes their own neighbours. The people hit with heavy criminal penalties – and rightly so – were not mainly individuals breaking the lockdown but those business owners who took advantage of the crisis to jack up prices.
Although capitalist ruling classes were quick to denounce China for its “authoritarian” lockdown of Wuhan, before long they were compelled to implement similar measures – often for much longer periods in total than the two months that Wuhan was locked down for. It is important to note that Wuhan and the other cities in Hubei that had stringent lockdowns only amounted to 4% of China’s population. In a further 12% of China for varying periods of between one to four weeks at the height of her pandemic in February 2020 people were placed into a lockdown similar to the one that Greater Sydney and southeast Queensland residents are under right now. However, most of the residents of the rest of China have never had to be in any sort of lockdown. This includes all the residents of well-known cities like Shanghai, Xian, Chengdu and Chongqing as well as over 90% of the people living in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Tianjin. At the height of the pandemic in China – and for short later periods when cases were detected in particular regions in subsequent small outbreaks – there were closures of schools, theatres and clubs, restrictions on the passenger density of buses and trains and sometimes, grassroots-organised, management of neighbourhoods involving frequent temperature testing of residents and where outsiders entering a residential area had to register their real names and have their temperature checked. However, three quarters of the people of China have never had to be in a Greater Sydney-style, actual lockdown for any time during this entire pandemic. Moreover, the longer that this pandemic has gone on, the more that China has been able to suppress sporadic outbreaks without needing to lockdown whole cities. Thus, when the megacity of Guangzhou had an outbreak three months ago, the PRC was able to suppress the spread while only ever needing to lockdown five streets in one district of the entire city. It is telling that while a week ago, nearly 60% of Australia’s population was locked down and right now Greater Sydney, Wollongong, the NSW Central Coast, the Blue Mountains, Greater Brisbane, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast are all under lockdown, at most 120 thousand people in China, a country of 1.45 billion people, are under any sort of stay-at-home, lockdown measures right now. Although there are also some restrictions on outbound travel in a handful of Chinese cities dealing with small outbreaks of the Delta variant, most of the rest of the people in China are able to live their lives like there is no pandemic at all.
So how has the PRC been able to respond so effectively to the pandemic and increasingly without needing to lockdown large populations for lengthy periods? One reason is China’s high vaccination rate. In a massive feat of public health mobilisation, the PRC has administered 1.7 billion vaccine doses to her people in the space of just a few months. Given that she is using two-dose vaccines, this means that the PRC is already three-quarters of the way to fully vaccinating the 80% of her population required to achieve herd immunity. As a percentage of her population, the PRC has administered nearly two and a half times as many doses as Australia’s regime has. This is one of the reasons why, while fifteen people have already died in Sydney since this latest outbreak started in June, not a single one of China’s 1,450 million people have died from COVID for more than six months!
It is important to know why China’s vaccination campaign has been so successful. China’s first vaccine to get WHO approval – and the mainstay of her campaign – is produced by her biggest pharmaceutical company, Sinopharm. In keeping with the PRC’s socialistic system where public ownership plays the dominant role, Sinopharm is a state-owned enterprise. So while Canberra has had to haggle with capitalist corporations like Pfizer, Moderna, CSL and AstraZeneca in order to obtain vaccine supply – as the pharma-biotech giants play governments off against each other while they try to squeeze every last dollar of profit they can out of the misery and desperation of the COVID-hit world – in China the main vaccine supplier happens to be collectively owned by the very users of the vaccine: that is, by nearly 1.5 billion Chinese people. Therefore, China has had no problem in ensuring vaccine supply. Moreover, given that the vaccine manufacturer is collectively owned by all the Chinese people, the Chinese people are in effect “buying” the vaccines off themselves! This is very different to the reality here. For example, the Australian-owned, multinational giant that locally manufactures the AstraZeneca vaccine, CSL, which was privatised by the Keating Labor government in 1994 and is actually Australia’s largest company by market capitalisation, is a greedy profit-obsessed corporation. Its wealthy owners made a massive, after tax, net profit of $1.8 billion in just the six months to February (that is, even before profits from the AstraZeneca production came on board). Among the big shareholders raking in these profits are the chairman, Brian McNamee, and the CEO, Paul Perrault, both of whom own around $47 million of shares. In addition to the profits he extracts through his massive shareholding, CEO Perrault additionally received a total remuneration package last year of a staggering $40 million! And guess whose going to be paying this year to help sustain these mega-profits and obscene executive remuneration levels? As always that’s going to be the workers of CSL through their labour being exploited but also all of us working class and middle-class people via the flow of public money into paying CSL for the vaccine supply contract.
Now, in addition to the vaccine produced by China’s very un-CSL-like pharma giant, Sinopharm, there is a second China-developed vaccine approved by the WHO which is produced by privately-owned, Sinovac. As a result of the unfinished character of China’s transition to socialism and the fact that China’s compromise-seeking leadership has allowed too much of a capitalist private sector into the economy, capitalists do exist in China – like the ones who own Sinovac. However, as China’s best known capitalist, Jack Ma, has been finding out over the last couple of years, those capitalists that do exist in China do not have the “right” to exploit the masses with the same “freedom” as do the owners of Pfizer, Moderna, CSL, BHP and Amazon in the capitalist countries. Instead, they face much state pressure to give back to society – especially when China’s egalitarian-minded masses agitate for a crackdown on the capitalists’ greed. Failure of these exploiters to comply could see not only their wings clipped, as has happened to Ma, but risks them being completely – and we may add deservedly – squashed. Recently, the PRC banned all privately-owned tutoring firms from making a profit and last week ordered operators of food delivery companies to ensure that all delivery workers are guaranteed wages no less than the local minimum wage. Therefore, the owners of Sinovac will find it much harder to do to the Chinese people what Pfizer, CSL, Moderna and the like have been doing to the Australian people and, even more so, to the people of low-income countries.
Ensuring a supply of vaccines is a key part of any vaccination campaign but it is only one part. The vaccines then have to be transported, stored and delivered. Here too the backbone role played by public ownership in China comes into play. Not only is the PRC’s healthcare system and aged care sector overwhelmingly dominated by public and community healthcare providers but so are all the major airlines used to transport vaccines as well as plenty of buildings, gymnasiums and other infrastructure needed for the delivery of the vaccines. This contrasts with the situation here where governments at all levels have been on such a big privatisation binge that so much of the buildings, other assets and even land needed for a public health campaign have been sold off, making it that much harder to quickly pool resources together for an emergency mobilisation.
The PRC’s success in responding to the COVID threat is not merely due to her vaccination campaign. Even before she began rolling out her vaccines, the PRC had largely suppressed the COVID threat. One reason for this is that, after a painful lesson in the early days of the epidemic about how easily COVID could be passed onto healthcare workers, the PRC was able to ensure that all her nurses, hospital janitors, paramedics, doctors, aged care workers and other medical workers were equipped with head-to-toe space-suit style PPE. As a result, from about a month after COVID was first detected, the deadly transmission that we have seen in Australia between healthcare workers or aged care workers on the one hand and patients or aged care residents on the other – and also amongst healthcare and aged care workers themselves – has been largely prevented in China. To supply the PPE needed to protect her workers, China’s state-owned industrial enterprises, whose ultimate goal is to serve the public rather than wealthy shareholders, quickly turned their operations into factories making PPE, disinfectants, non-contact thermometers, testing kits, masks and ventilators. Even state-owned aircraft manufacturers, car factories, oil giants and even underwear manufacturers were marshalled for this purpose. Such a mobilisation is very difficult in capitalist countries because the private enterprises that dominate the economy are totally driven by profit. They will only agree to such a hugely expensive switch in production if they can be sure that they can make big bucks out of it and if they are given guarantees that the demand for PPE and other pandemic relief items will continue for the long term. That is why Australia’s hospital and aged care workers ended up with such a shortage of adequate PPE last year – and why this shortage still persists to a fair degree to this very day – with fatal consequences for hundreds of people.
Meanwhile, in the PRC, the existence of a workers regime has compelled even the privately owned of China’s manufacturers of COVID testing kits to provide adequate supply of these kits at low prices. As a result, in China, all workers at hospitals, aged care homes, ports, airports, borders, transportation hubs and prisons are given very frequent COVID tests. This enables the PRC to detect new outbreaks amongst her most pandemic-exposed population very quickly. Moreover, once there is a significant outbreak in an area, the PRC moves into a massive testing operation. The same public ownership and control over buildings, land, infrastructure and airlines that has allowed China to so quickly vaccinate her population is again brought into play. This enables the PRC to conduct mass COVID testing with lightning speed, while largely sparing her people the lengthy queuing that people in working-class southwest Sydney have had to go through over the last several weeks.
A case study of how the PRC’s COVID response works can be seen in the way that they have handled a recent Delta variant outbreak in the megacity of Nanjing. The outbreak was first detected on July 20 during routine COVID testing of airport workers. Although the size of this outbreak is much smaller than the current one in Sydney, the PRC quickly moved into a massive testing operation. Within twelve days of the Nanjing outbreak being detected, the PRC tested the entire city of 9.3 million residents (except for babies) for COVID three times! Today Nanjing started its fourth round of all-inclusive testing (by the way, the COVID test used in China does not require the uncomfortable swab pushed into the nose method used here). Those found to be infected have all been moved into hospitals. This practice not only ensures that COVID-symptomatic people get proper medical treatment and have no problems safely accessing food and other basic needs but guarantees that they do not pass on the virus to household members, both of which has been occurring in Sydney with this latest outbreak, often with tragic consequences. Through these means, the PRC has been able to prevent the Nanjing outbreak from getting out of control within days. Moreover, although theatres, gyms, tourist sites and face-to-face training have been closed in the city, the PRC is managing to slow the Nanjing outbreak without locking down the whole city. Indeed, just four particular areas of one sub-district – a sub-district whose entire population is only 80,000 people out of a city of 9.3 million – have been placed into lockdown. Meanwhile, the same mass testing-focused method used in Nanjing is also being used to contain subsequent, small secondary spreads in other cities, including Wuhan.
Of course, to be able to treat all infected people during an outbreak in hospitals, as China does, often requires the rapid conversion of gymnasiums, stadiums and other buildings into makeshift hospitals; or the creation of brand new hospitals. Here again the dominance of social ownership in the PRC’s economy is brought to bear. With the biggest developers, equipment manufacturers, communication firms and power companies under public ownership, it has been socialistic state-owned enterprises who have done the heavy lifting in building China’s make-shift hospitals at lightning speed when needed. In Wuhan, during the height of the pandemic there, these socialistic enterprises even built and equipped two massive, brand new, infectious disease hospitals – complete with negative pressure rooms to prevent COVID spreading from infected patients to staff and others – in less than two weeks. Here, in that time, capitalist developers and other private contractors would still be busy scheming with their mates in government over how much money they could get away with being paid for such an urgent contract. Moreover, the developers would be reluctant to disrupt any existing contract that was more profitable.
It is apparent that the marshalling of resources needed to pull off the measures that socialistic China has applied to beat down COVID goes against the very nature of Australia’s capitalist system. However, that does not mean it is impossible here to win the implementation of some of these measures. After all, giving pay rises is also against the nature of capitalist bosses but through determined collective action by workers we can sometimes force these bosses to grant pay rises. What working class people in Australia and our allies urgently need to fight for then is:
- For selected compatible manufacturers and pharmaceutical-biotech firms to be ordered to immediately supply at a low price, variously, PPE, COVID testing kits and other pandemic relief items. If they refuse or delay, the enterprises should be immediately confiscated and brought into public ownership.
- For developers and equipment suppliers to be ordered to undertake at low cost and high speed the conversion of designated buildings into make-shift hospitals to enable the hospitalisation of all COVID-infected people.
- For the immediate placing of all banks under state control. This is essential to directing the capital needed for manufacturers, pharma-biotech firms and developers to be able to quickly switch over their operations to the delivery of PPE, COVID testing kits, makeshift hospitals etc. We also need credit being allocated into areas that will help reduce the level of job losses. We need this nationalisation of the banks right now and we need it all the time. For the nationalised banks to be put under people’s supervision such that all major bank operations can be inspected by committees consisting of unionised bank employees’ representatives alongside representatives of other unions and mass organisations.
- For the state requisitioning of unused private buildings for use in COVID vaccination and testing.
- For the confiscation of private aged-care homes from profit-making aged care companies and their placing into public ownership and control. These notoriously greedy, profit-driven operators have all too often neglected to provide adequate PPE for staff, failed to follow basic pandemic safety protocols and have denied their staff the job and income security that would allow them to feel at ease taking sick leave while having symptoms. We need to put a stop to this immediately! It is in these private aged care homes where nearly three quarters of all those who have died from COVID in Australia have perished! Right now a new outbreak at the privately-owned Hardi Wyoming nursing home in Sydney’s Inner West has already infected 19 elderly patients and two workers.
In theory, even some capitalists whose “property rights” are not directly affected by some of the measures listed above would benefit from them in the immediate term. For by quickly bringing COVID under control, these measures would protect the overall economy. However, all capitalists would resist these plainly rational measures as they would worry that any impinging on the “right” of private business owners to deploy their operations in the way that is most profitable to them could see momentum created for further inroads into capitalist “property rights,” not least because the working class masses would see the obvious benefit of bringing key sectors of the economy under public control. That is why any such measures needed to control the pandemic will need to be fought for by the collective action of the working class. In doing so, the working class would also be able to draw in behind them those middle class elements who could see the rationality of this program.
An example of the type of struggle needed was seen in the powerful action, two weeks ago, by 200 cleaners at Westmead Hospital. They were so alarmed by the state’s failure to provide them with adequate PPE, or to even allow them to shower in the hospital after their shifts, that they refused to work at the hospital’s COVID unit until they were fitted with adequate PPE. Their totally supportable action eventually won these workers improved PPE. The fight against COVID is very much intertwined with the struggle for workers rights because so much of the transmission, in especially this latest outbreak, is occurring within workplaces. Workers’ collective action needs to push back against capitalist bosses and high-paid state bureaucrats both of whom are willing to risk the health of workers to boost their profits and careers. We need to fight for:
- Union safety committees at each workplace. These will struggle to ensure that each workplace has proper pandemic deterrence procedures and that workers are provided with adequate PPE. If any site is found to be dangerous, workers should walk off the job until the site is made safe. At non-unionised work sites, more class conscious workers should take the lead in organising workers together into safety committees to play the same role. This could be a catalyst for organising workers into unions at these sites. No management to be allowed to participate in safety committee meetings.
- All workers to be granted unlimited fully paid pandemic leave for COVID-19 treatment and quarantining paid for by the bosses – not the reduced amount being granted by governments.
Myth Number 4: “Australia Took the Lead in
Pushing for an Inquiry into the Origins of COVID”
Actually most of the world, including China, wanted a scientific inquiry into the origins of COVID. What Scott Morrison’s government, backed by the ALP, pushed for was a political “inquiry” that operated based on the presumption of “guilt” on the part of China. The type of “inquiry” that the Liberal government pushed for was a witch-hunting one like the Royal Commission into Australian trade unions that it established in 2014. Australia’s foreign minister even compared the sort of COVID inquiry that Canberra wanted with “weapons inspectors,” thus provocatively linking the inquiry with the cover of “international inspection” that was used to justify the brutal U.S./British/Australian invasion of Iraq.
How sincere the Australian ruling class is about truly determining the origins of COVID can be seen by their reaction to a detailed four-week scientific study in Wuhan conducted by a team of WHO experts. When these experts published their findings earlier this year and it became clear that the science did not match the China-bashing agenda of the Australian, American and other imperialist regimes, Biden, Morrison and Co. simply trashed the experts’ report. This is despite the Australian expert on the team, Director of NSW Health Pathology at Westmead Hospital, Dominic Dwyer, defending the findings of the inquiry and praising Wuhan authorities for being “pretty open” with the team during their investigation.
In any case, the origins of the coronavirus is actually not the most important pandemic issue that requires an inquiry. The harsh reality is that outbreaks of deadly viruses have been with us since time immemorial. The last deadly world pandemic, which ravaged the world from 1918 to 1920 (it was inaccurately known as the Spanish flu but actually originated in Kansas in the USA) killed between four to twenty times as many people as the current pandemic has. Moreover, it did so at a time when the world’s population was less than a quarter of what it is now. With the population density of the world growing, it is inevitable that humans will become more prone to being infected with animal-borne viruses. Moreover, when a new virus strikes the human population, it is impossible to curb the spread at the very start. The virus will quietly spread between people before they notice symptoms and before doctors are aware that a new killer is on the loose. So the real practical question that must be looked at is, once a new virus with pandemic potential has an initial spread, how do we contain and suppress it? And there are already some clear answers if we take a cold hard look at the different responses to COVID. In China, the total death toll from the pandemic currently stands at 4,636 people. This is in a country with one in five of the world’s people. That means that if every country had responded as effectively to the COVID threat as the PRC has, the international death toll would at most be 25,000 rather than the nearly four and a half million official death toll that we have today.
In reality the death toll would have been much less than even this because most countries would have had the advance warning that the virus was coming that the PRC never had. Moreover, if every country had responded as effectively to the COVID threat as the PRC has, the virus would have been completely contained and suppressed months ago. Why this did not occur and why do we have the catastrophic disaster that we face today? That is the real, practical, life and death question that humanity must now ask itself.
As we explained when exposing the previous myths discussed above, the Australian and other capitalist ruling classes are fearful that their “own” masses will see the success of China’s COVID response and start demanding similar measures in their own countries; and most frighteningly (for the capitalist bigwigs) start advocating for the public control of the economy that would make such measures achievable. So the Western imperialist rulers are doing everything possible to divert people away from seeing the success of the PRC’s pandemic response and away from seeing what measures were taken to achieve that success. By this obfuscation, by resisting the kind of measures that could quickly suppress the outbreaks that are sweeping through Sydney and threatening to do the same to southeast Queensland, Australia’s capitalist ruling class are costing the lives of numerous people and causing huge numbers of others to lose their livelihoods.
So let’s work hard to dispel the China-bashing myths about the pandemic spread by the likes of Morrison, Biden, Albanese, Boris Johnson and the capitalist media. And while we are at it, let’s oppose the equally dishonest attacks on the PRC – as well on the other socialistic countries Cuba, DPRK, Vietnam and Laos – over supposed “human rights” violations. For just as it is in the interests of all working class and middle class people to fight for the implementation here of the kind of measures that the PRC has used to squash the pandemic over there, it is in the interests of the overwhelming majority of the world to defend the socialistic rule that has enabled China’s pandemic-response success story.
Myth Number 5: “The Government’s February 2020 Ban on Foreign Nationals
Arriving from China Saved Australia from a Disastrous COVID Outbreak”
Actually, by the date that the Morrison government banned foreign nationals and non-permanent residents arriving into Australia from China on 1 February 2020, the PRC had so successfully kept the coronavirus out of the huge part of China that is outside of Wuhan (and a few surrounding areas in Hubei Province) – whose residents could not enter Australia or any other country because Wuhan and the affected other parts of Hubei were all then under lockdown – that no one who could have then entered Australia from China would have been infected with the coronavirus. This is proven by the fact that, as reported by then Deputy Chief Medical Officer (now Chief Medical Officer) of Australia, Paul Kelly, in the four weeks after the ban was implemented, of the 40,000 people who did arrive into Australia from China (who were allowed to do so because they were Australian citizens or permanent residents), not one single one of them was found to be infected with the coronavirus, despite very careful screening of these people. The few people who did arrive from China with the coronavirus came in January 2020. However, because China had warned the world at the start of January of the threat posed by the new virus, those few cases were quickly identified by screening done in Australia and did not pass the virus onto others. It turns out that arrivals from China did not cause any of the community spread of the virus within Australia at all.
The government’s ban on arrivals from China, done with the full support of the ALP, had more to do with advancing their Cold War China-bashing than with protecting people from COVID. This was proven by the government’s conduct over the subsequent few weeks. In this time, medical data was coming in from Italy, Germany, other West European countries and the U.S. showing that large numbers of people were being infected with the coronavirus in those countries. However, even as this information was screaming at their face to act, the Liberal government waited weeks before introducing any quarantining of the large numbers of people who were arriving into Australia every day from these countries. In order to achieve their Cold War goal of portraying Red China negatively, the Australian regime had to maintain, for as long as possible, their specific travel ban on only China – or at most China and a couple of other countries – so as to keep as much focus of suspicion on China as they could. The result is that it was arrivals from Western Europe, cruise ships and the U.S. – through no fault of their own but with plenty of fault lying at the feet of the Australian government – that brought the pandemic to Australia. The bipartisan distortion of quarantine and travel restriction policies to meet Cold War agendas was, thus, in big part responsible for Australia’s first wave of the pandemic and the approximately one hundred lives that it took.
Myth Number 6: “We are All in the Same Boat in Dealing With COVID”
Tell that to the many workers who, through years of toil, have enabled their bosses to extract a fortune but at the first sign of a reduction in profits caused by the pandemic were thrown out of their jobs or stood down without pay by these very same “Aussie” capitalist bosses. Or tell that to the workers who, insecure about losing their jobs during this crisis, have been bullied by their bosses out of important working conditions like receipt of shift penalties.
As for Australian governments of various stripes, their real attitude is typified, not by their “all in the same boat” rhetoric, but by the starkly contrasting ways that the NSW state government has dealt with the latest outbreak as it moved from Sydney’s wealthy Eastern suburbs to the working class, heavily multiracial, southwest and west of Sydney. When the Delta variant was first spreading within Sydney’s Eastern suburbs in mid to late June, the Berejiklian government was very slow to take measures that, at the cost of inconveniencing the affluent residents of the affected region, could have obstructed the outbreak from spreading to other parts of Sydney. However, once the virus spread to Sydney’s working class and heavily Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Pacific Islander background southwest and west, the government did not hesitate to decree strict restrictions on people living in the new centres of the outbreak in order to stop the outbreak moving out of those areas. To be sure, in the absence of the government’s ability and willingness to implement the kind of measures that socialistic China has used to suppress outbreaks, the government had little choice by this stage. However, the contrast between their approach to the residents of the Fairfield, Liverpool, Canterbury-Bankstown, Cumberland and Blacktown local government areas and the soft touch given to the residents of wealthier suburbs – a soft touch that allowed this Bondi cluster to get out of control – is striking.
Where the contrast is most evident is the way in which the government, the high-up bureaucrats and the mainstream media portray the people living in the shifting virus hotspots. When the Bondi cluster was very much localised within the Eastern suburbs, the ruling class did not engage in blaming the residents of the affected area (nor should they have). However, once the centre of the outbreak spread to Sydney’s southwest, they launched a series of attacks on the residents of the region, with barely disguised anti-working class and racist undertones. None in the ruling class sought to explain that it was inevitable that the virus was more prone to spreading quickly in the working class southwest and west of Sydney given how many frontline and essential workers live in the region and are, thus, more at risk of getting infected. Then to add insult to injury, the police were deployed in big numbers to southwest Sydney in a very ostentatious show of force, nominally to enforce the lockdown. This brought a furious reaction from many residents of the region. They rightly pointed out the contrast between the way that residents in the Eastern suburbs were handled with the way that they were now being treated. What amplified the anger of local residents is that police, as well as being notorious for their racist brutality towards Aboriginal people, are known for their heavy-handed treatment of people of colour and those from low-income households; both of whom make up a high proportion of the residents of the areas where heavy policing was being unleashed. As many residents pointed out: they need more testing services and not police. Now the Australian regime has gone even further. They have actually deployed the army to the virus hotspot areas of southwestern and western Sydney. The capitalist rulers do not miss a chance to try and boost the authority of their military – with its reputation badly damaged by revelations of widespread, horrendous war crimes in Afghanistan – and to get people used to the idea of the military being deployed domestically. To the many residents in the suburbs where the Australian military is being deployed who originate from countries like Afghanistan and Iraq and where Australian and allied militaries have committed horrific torture and murder of civilians, seeing the ADF deployed in their neighbourhoods is terrifying.
So we are not buying the line spun by Morrison, Hunt, Albanese and the Murdoch, Kerry Stokes (billionaire owner of Channel 7), Bruce Gordon (filthy rich, right-wing owner of Channel 9, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2GB and other ex-Fairfax media) and regime-owned media outlets about us all being “in the same boat.” In reality people in this country are in about three different boats. A massive luxury cruise liner for the small number who make up the big end of town. A more modest but comfortable boat for the upper-middle class. And for the rest of us, a rickety overcrowded boat where those of lowest income are squeezed into the most uncomfortable parts; and on which we are regularly raided by the enforcers for the capitalist rulers – enforcers who come in their speedboats to hurl some of us into the water in order to scare the rest of us into steering the boat in a direction that those on the luxury cruise liner find most convenient.
Let’s demand: Australian military, get out of the streets of southwestern and western Sydney! Get back to your barracks! Stop the vilification of the multi-racial, working class people of southwest Sydney! For more testing services in southwestern and western Sydney, not heavy-handed police deployments!
Myth Number 7: “The Government’s Jobkeeper Program
Sought to Save the Jobs of Workers”
Jobkeeper was designed to mostly help capitalist business owners. And that is whom it mostly benefited. In just the first three months after the scheme was implemented, $4.6 billion of it went into the pockets of capitalist operations that actually increased their profits from pre-pandemic levels. Over 150,000 sets of business owners that made increased profits were paid out of the scheme in its first three months of operation. Among those in this category are port operator Qube Holdings (founded by notorious union buster Chris Corrigan) which received $13.5 million in subsidies from April to June last year. Meanwhile, furniture, electrical and whitegoods retailer Harvey Norman, which is owned by its billionaire chairman Gerry Harvey, received a total of $22 million in Jobkeeper payments despite its profits more than doubling during the pandemic. Another $8 billion of Jobkeeper grants went into the pockets of an additional 200,000 capitalist operators whose profits did not fall below the threshold levels that the scheme was meant to kick in under. And that was just in the first three months of Jobkeeper. The scheme did save some workers jobs and to that extent we did not campaign against the scheme. However, the most vulnerable workers including international students and most casual workers were not protected by the scheme. Moreover, the tens of billions in handouts to business owners will end up being paid for by working class and middle class people, both out of our taxes, and through the cuts in public services that will be needed to cover the budget hit caused by the scheme.
Although the ALP Opposition is finally now, in 2021, starting to criticise the flow of Jobkeeper dollars into the bank accounts of billionaires, they offer no other strategy for preventing job losses. In contrast, what we say is needed is a fight to win secure, permanent jobs for all through forcing the capitalist bosses to hire and retain more workers than they want to, at the expense of their own profits. This fight to defend and enhance the livelihoods of workers is at one and the same time a struggle to beat back the pandemic. For the lack of job security for most workers is part of the reason why COVID has been spreading so readily within workplaces and nursing homes. For example, because many aged care workers are denied permanency and stable, adequate work hours, they are compelled to work at many different sites, thus inadvertently spreading the virus from nursing home to nursing home. Meanwhile, workers who are insecure about their jobs, especially casual workers, are torn between the need to self-quarantine when showing COVID symptoms and the compulsion to still go to work when they have mild symptoms in order to protect their jobs and retain the flow of their meagre incomes. The capitalist ruling class then blames these workers if they go to work but at the same time the individual capitalist bosses will not hesitate to throw these same workers into the scrapheap if they find that they can’t extract enough profit out of them.
Therefore, both as a means to defend our livelihoods and as a weapon to combat the COVID threat, the working class and our allies should unite to demand:
- A ban on all job cuts or unpaid stand downs by any firm making a profit, however small.
- A ban on all job cuts or unpaid stand downs by any company whose highest paid executive has an annual payment package in excess of $1 million.
- The forcing of any company still making a profit to increase its number of full-time paid employees by at least twenty-five workers for every one million dollars of quarterly profit.
- The immediate conversion of all casual workers into permanent employees with all the rights of permanency.
To such a program, the capitalist exploiters and all the ruling class politicians, mainstream media commentators and official economists who serve them will scream that this is “totally impractical”, “will cause investment to collapse”, etc, etc. When they do, all socialists should use that opportunity to explain to the working class masses that this is precisely why we socialists insist that the means of production be stripped away from the rich capitalists and brought into public ownership under a workers government. It is that socialistic system, after all, that even in an unfinished and bureaucratically distorted form is enabling the world’s most populous country to not only beat back the COVID threat but to increasingly do so with only the very sparing use of the lockdown method. It is in good part to stop working class people in this country from seeing the necessity to fight for a socialist response to the pandemic – and to fight for a socialist system more generally – that Australia’s capitalist rulers have spread a whole lot of myths about both their own and about China’s very different response to the pandemic. Let’s dispel these myths! Let’s open the road to a rational, pro-working class program to both beat back the COVID threat and to mitigate the economic hardships to the masses resulting from the pandemic!
