The siege and the stabbing
Inequality kills. The growing imbalance in the distribution of our wealth has a death toll. In late 2014, two individuals in different circumstances took violent and homicidal action, only a few days...
View ArticleGreek lessons
The Left in this country can learn from the example of Syriza’s rise and the difficulties it has encountered. Syriza did not come to power because of a few powerful individuals or a charismatic...
View ArticleWage rage and penalty rates
In truth, this was yet another example of the trading away of workplace rights and conditions in return for pay (whether that’s increasing real pay, maintaining pay or attempting to slow its decline)....
View ArticleHoping against history
Even if Labor can increase its primary vote at the next federal election (and this is not necessarily a given) it will likely only gain a share similar to 2010 – hardly a paragon of achievement. A...
View ArticleAbsorbing Corbyn
Corbyn’s election sets up a real-world challenge to a central belief of Australian Labor’s political class – that shifting to the left will not win elections. This betrays a two-dimensional sort of...
View ArticleThe case for a universal basic income
Recent news out of Finland that has caught the attention of global commentators. The small Nordic country is currently drafting plans to replace their welfare system with a UBI, which would see every...
View ArticleThe case for a 30-hour working week
Think about your own life. What would you do if the full-time working week was reduced to 30 hours?
View ArticleThe #PanamaPapers and the Wizards of Oz
It’s the largest document leak in history: 11.5 million files and 2.6 terabytes of information detailing how our global elite avoid their responsibility to the rest of us. The Panama Papers have...
View ArticleMaintain the wage rage
The penalty rates decision can’t be seen in isolation: it is a symptom of an economy and society in flux, and the product of a system that has valued parliamentary and institutional power at the...
View ArticleVictoria’s lost love for Labor (part one)
On 21 December 2017, I was having a few drinks at the office Christmas party at a Docklands bar. The venue lies opposite a stadium whose old name is forgotten every few years, depending on which bunch...
View ArticleVictoria’s lost love for Labor: firefighters and unions (part two)
The Liberal Party’s Labor-union attacks are focused on further reinforcing the narrative that ordinary people have lost control. When it comes to pro-worker legislation, the Liberal Opposition will say...
View ArticleHow Labor can win back Victoria’s love (part three)
Rezoning decisions are easy money if you have the right connections. A rezoning windfall profits tax, a form of betterment tax, would ensure the uplift in property values from government zoning...
View ArticleRage, rage against the factory closure
On 1 May 2017, May Day – International Workers’ Day – Australian dairy giant Murray Goulburn announced that they were shutting factories across Victoria and Tasmania, slashing jobs and devastating...
View ArticleTaking back worker power: Elizabeth Humphrys’ How Labour Built Neoliberalism
By highlighting the movement’s role in actively constructing neoliberal society, Humphrys points to a future in which labour can unmake neoliberal society. If the complicity of the working-class was...
View ArticleThe cooperative solution to stagnant wages
There is no reason why Australia cannot build up a worker cooperative sector employing tens of thousands of people in well-paid secure jobs over the next decade. These are just the sort of jobs that...
View ArticleWhy we need two-weeks special leave in the fight against Coronavirus
Moralising about how people should behave in a labour market, especially at a time when even the market for basic hygiene products, like toilet paper, is breaking down will not solve anything. We face...
View ArticleIt’s renewables or barbarism: how to cure Australia from its case of Dutch...
Australia’s case of Dutch disease has real political dimensions. The Australian state has represents what we might call in vulgar Marxist terms an executive committee for the mining industry.
View ArticleA plague of the working classes
For every extra day of lockdown, for every extra quarantine measure, and for every additional restriction placed on Victorians, it is the corporations pushing insecure work and forcing workers to turn...
View ArticleA plague of the working classes, part two: ‘‘We need to stand up’
True security and safety only comes through people acting together. Legal rights and entitlements are the shadows, the remnants and echoes of the great motor of history: workers uniting in the struggle...
View ArticleA plague of the working classes, part three: it is what we take with us
COVID-19 is one crisis among many, along with those that invest the climate, democracy and capitalism. Even as it subsides, those others will remain and intensify. If COVID-19 can have any lasting,...
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