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Bust Morrison’s Myths about Australia’s Response to the Deadly Pandemic

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
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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!

Resist Anti-Asian Hate Attacks!

Above: Hundreds of people march through the street’s of New Zealand’s Auckland to protest against racist attacks on Asian background people.
Photo Credit: Zhao Gang/Xinhua

Unite the Workers Movement with All Anti-Racists to

Resist Anti-Asian Hate Attacks!

Oppose the Cold War Campaign against Socialistic China
That Goes Hand in Hand with Anti-Asian Violence

22 April 2021: Over the last 14 months, racist rednecks in Australia have assaulted and verbally abused thousands of people of Asian background. Politicians who blame China for the pandemic are inflaming hatred against people of Chinese background and anyone else who could look Chinese to an ignorant racist. It is not just the vile Donald Trump who is guilty of this. Here, the entire capitalist establishment – from the Liberals, to the ALP, to the Greens, to all the mainstream media – is waging a Cold War propaganda campaign to demonize socialistic China and any Chinese background person who has any sympathy for the PRC. The result of their campaign is reflected in the fact that a survey conducted by the Asian Australian Alliance collected reports of over 500 incidents of COVID-19 related racism in just the last year alone.

To blame a particular ethnicity or a country for a virus is both disgusting and anti-scientific. Viruses carry no passport! Moreover, the pandemic’s spread into Australia did not at all come from China. Socialistic China contained COVID so effectively that, according to data from Australian institutions, the number of COVID infected people that arrived here from mainland China numbered at most just 22. And as arrivals from China were closely monitored, this tiny number of people did not cause any community spread within Australia. By contrast, by April last year, 1,460 infected people had already entered from Europe. Because the Morrison government wanted to maintain travel restrictions specifically focused on China for as long as possible – in order to whip up suspicion of Red China – they allowed people from the virus-plagued lands of Italy, the U.S. and Britain to enter during the early period of the pandemic with little screening. As a result, it was arrivals from Europe and America who brought COVID into Australia. This was, of course, no fault on their part. But this fact makes a mockery of both the overt racists who have attacked Asians for COVID and the covert white supremacists in parliament and in the media who have pushed people onto this anti-Asian, racist path by dishonestly blaming China for the pandemic.

Where Do All These Hate Crimes against People of Asian Background Come from?

In the three years before the pandemic even began, there was a horrific series of violent attacks on Chinese students and Asian Australians. So, why all these hate crimes? Firstly, Australian society is extremely racist. After all, the current “order” was founded on the murderous, racist dispossession of Aboriginal people. As in all capitalist societies, the ruling elite and those who serve them whip up racism to divert the anger of the masses that they exploit – anger over the serious lack of secure jobs and the dearth of affordable housing – onto racial minorities. It is not only the right-wing Coalition who do this. Previous NSW ALP leader, Michael Daley, incited this kind of hatred when he disgustingly blamed young Asian migrants for taking local jobs and pushing young people out of Sydney. The result of all this is that while Aboriginal people suffer the most extreme oppression, other non-white communities are also targeted: from Asians to Muslims to Africans. Attacks on Asians are especially severe due to the reality that – because of this land’s natural wealth and because Australia’s capitalists exploit workers in our region even more cruelly than they exploit workers here at home – this country is a relatively rich, white-dominated enclave neighbored by billions of poorer Asians. This allows Australia’s rulers to manufacture fears that the white masses’ standard of living will be diluted by the entry of huge populations from neighboring Asia.

The second driver of anti-Asian hatred is economic nationalism. Politicians call for “protecting Australian jobs” through restricting imports. Such protectionism inevitably fuels racism as the white masses are pushed to lump locals from Chinese, Korean and Indian backgrounds with their compatriots abroad who are blamed (wrongly) for “taking Australian jobs.” More than even the conservatives it is the ALP, the Greens and, sadly, the current leaders of our trade unions who most promote protectionism. With no program based on actual struggle and industrial action to win jobs they resort to these schemes that set workers here against their counterparts abroad. Yet all that protectionist measures “achieve” is to set off reciprocal measures abroad so that, in the end, no one’s job is saved while local workers are left divided from their crucial worker allies abroad.

Right now, the biggest cause of anti-Asian attacks is the imperialist Cold War against socialistic China. Western populations are being bombarded with constant anti-China propaganda: from lies about the pandemic to the completely hysterical claim that China is “brutally oppressing” her Muslim Uyghur minority (a claim that most Muslim-majority countries have rejected – instead praising China’s treatment of Uyghurs). The result of this propaganda is that there has been a sharp spike in anti-Asian violence in countries at the forefront of the Cold War from the U.S. to Canada to Australia. To be sure, the politicians and media promoting anti-China hate say that they are only opposed to communist Chinese and not to all Chinese. But they know full well that they are dog whistling to anti-Asian xenophobia in order to strengthen their anti-communist campaign. Meanwhile, the “academic” who has provided the “intellectual” cover for the campaign, Clive Hamilton, has openly placed Chinese Australians in the cross-hairs of rabid racists by claiming that many Chinese migrants are part of a pro-communist network that is secretly “invading” Australian politics and “civil society.”

It is not only right-wing forces who have been spearheading the anti-Red China charge. Pro-establishment “progressives” have been just as rabid. One of the most fanatical is NSW Greens MP, David Shoebridge, who has spearheaded the campaign to kick out of Australia the China-connected Chinese language institute, the Confucius Institute. Meanwhile, right-wing Chinese groups like Falun Dafa and Hong Kong pro-British-colonial outfits have, out of shared hostility to Red China, been supporting racist forces attacking Asians: from Trump to white supremacist groups. For their part, several left-wing groups – like Solidarity, Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance – while rightly campaigning against anti-Asian attacks have simultaneously fed into the anti-China campaign that has incited these attacks by themselves retailing anti-China propaganda over the pandemic, Uyghurs and Hong Kong. They, of course, say that they oppose the Chinese state and not the Chinese people. But ever since China’s 1949 anti-capitalist revolution, hostility to Red China and “Yellow Peril” racism have been very closely intertwined. This is because racism and opposition to socialistic China are both agendas that serve the same capitalist rulers – the latter to stop their own masses from being infected with anti-capitalist ideas. That is why, regardless of their intentions, those who feed into anti-communist propaganda against China – whether over the pandemic or over bogus “human rights” violations – are helping to fuel violence against East Asian background people. This was shown last month when, as part of “hosting a debate” over China, Socialist Alliance, in keeping with their bending to the anti-China campaign, legitimised (as a view for leftists to consider) the views of arch, “red-Chinese-under-the-beds” inciter Clive Hamilton by choosing to give space in their newspaper Green Left Weekly for Hamilton to publish an attack against those who call out anti-Chinese racism.

Fightback against Racist Attacks!

Given that the capitalist rulers are responsible for the frightening rise of anti-Asian hate, it is clear that they are not going to be the force to resist it. Nor should we expect protection from their “justice” system. In capitalist countries, all state enforcement organs from the police to the courts exist to enforce the rule of the rich exploiters over the working class. Given that racism is a key tool used by their capitalist masters to keep the exploited masses divided and weak, these organs themselves administer racist injustice. Here, police and prison guards have killed countless numbers of Aboriginal people. And look at what happened in the U.S. last month after a white man screaming “”I’m going to kill all Asians” shot dead six Asian women. The police captain overseeing the “response,” a racist who had promoted t-shirts blaming China for the coronavirus, despicably alibied the murderer by saying that the shooter was having “a really bad day.”

Fortunately, there is a powerful force that we can look towards not only as an ally but as a spearhead of the movement and that is the organised working class. For although the working class, like all classes, is currently infected with the prejudices promoted by the capitalist rulers, the multi-racial working class has an especially strong interest in combating racism. For it is essential for workers to build the unity needed to fight back against capitalist attacks on workers’ rights and job security. A taste of what the union movement can do was seen on 2 May 2014 in Brisbane when unionised construction workers joined with other anti-fascists to drive a violent white supremacist group off the streets. To make such events the norm rather than the exception, genuine class-struggle internationalists within the workers movement must campaign for the workers movement to champion the struggle against racist attacks, while simultaneously opposing the protectionism and anti-communist hostility to China promoted by the current pro-ALP leadership of the working class.

We in Trotskyist Platform call for the most politically aware sections of the workers movement to unite with Aboriginal people, all people of colour and all anti-racists to wage the following program of action:

  • When violent hate groups hold a public provocation, we should unite to sweep the scum off streets. Most race hate attacks are taking place at random by a large number of disparate racists. But by dealing severe blows to the most extreme racists we can encourage the more numerous, garden-variety rednecks to pull their heads in.
  • Oppose racist attacks on not only East Asians but on Aboriginal people, South Asians, Africans and Muslims! Any attack on one targeted community spreads the white supremacist virus that will eventually hurt other communities. For mass protest leading to union industrial action to oppose state killings of Aboriginal people!
  • No to protectionism! Fight for secure jobs by forcing bosses to increase hiring at the expense of their profits!
  • Resist the Cold War drive that is fueling anti-China violence! Oppose the Australian regime’s military buildup against socialistic China! Dispel the anti-China lies over the pandemic, “foreign interference” and bogus “human rights” violations! Defend Chinese Australians and others persecuted for expressing sympathy for China!
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We will only be able to throw racial hatred into the dustbin of history when we consign the capitalist system that fuels such prejudice into the same dustbin. Working class people and oppressed racial groups can advance towards that goal by strengthening our organisation and resolve through fighting back right now against racist attacks. Drive violent racists off the streets! Say no to economic nationalism! Resist the Cold War propaganda drive against socialistic China!

Put the Banks Under State Control

Australia’s Capitalist Finance Sector: Deception, Exploitation and Misdirection of Financial Resources

Especially at a Time when Resources Must Be Directed to
Respond to a Public Health Emergency & an Economic Collapse
We Must:

Put the Banks
Under State Control!

  • Royal Commission: A Slap on the Wrists for the Swindling Banks and Insurance Companies
  • The Myth That the Big Corporations Are Owned By “Everyday Australians” through Our Superannuation
  • Who Are “The Banks”?
  • The Big Banks, Big Insurers and the Owners of Smaller Finance Companies
  • Nationalise the Banks! Nationalise the Entire Health System!
  • State-Controlled Banks and COVID-19 Response: A Case Study
  • Build Towards the Future Confiscation of the Banks, Industry, Mines, Communications Infrastructure and Agricultural Land and Their Transfer into Public Ownership
  • We Need a Workers State
  • China’s Banks Are Genuinely Under Public Ownership Because the PRC Is a Workers State
  • The Program of Nationalisation of the Banks versus The Greens Party Agenda
  • The Struggles of Today That Can Blaze the Path Towards a Socialist Future

18 July 2020: In recent years, the ripping off of customers, deceit and even outright fraud practiced by Australian finance sector businesses has gained much attention. Four years ago it was revealed how CommInsure, the insurance arm of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), had refused to make promised life insurance payments to heart attack survivors. They “justified” this by using a definition of a heart attack that was so dodgy that even some people who had such a severe heart attack that they had to be resuscitated were denied their entitled pay outs! Such devious practices have been undertaken by finance sector enterprises big and small – from the big four banks and insurance giants to brokers and loan enablers and to retail businesses that hand out loans. As a result the banks, insurance companies and the brokers and others connected to them are widely hated by the masses. With good reason! Yet finance sector institutions have a decisive influence on society. For it is they who determine how credit is distributed and credit is absolutely critical to the running of modern economies. Especially at this desperate time when this country and much of the world face both a public health emergency and economic collapse, it is vital that credit is allocated in ways that can best respond to the COVID-19 virus threat and into areas that can best ensure that the jobs and wages of millions of working class people are guaranteed. Yet would you trust the lying, greed-driven bosses of the banks and insurance companies to do this? You would be totally nuts if you did! We need to put all the banks and insurance companies under state control! In other words, we need to nationalise the finance sector.

In late 2017, there was so much anger built up against the banks, insurance giants and brokers that former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, realising the need to “restore the credibility” of the finance sector, finally acceded to widespread demands for a royal commission into the banking and insurance industry. That Royal Commission revealed more details of what many of us already knew. Banks were giving secret commissions to brokers to entice them to get home buyers to take out home loans with their particular banks. Banks hid these payments in order to trick their customers into believing that their customers’ “own” brokers were “independent.” But, actually, the payments that these brokers received from particular banks gave them an incentive to get people to take out mortgages with these same particular banks even if that was not the best option for the broker’s customer. And the brokers did this in spades! Moreover, since the commission received by the broker got larger the bigger the loan taken out by their customers, the brokers, with a nod and a wink from the banks paying them, often pushed their customers into buying a more expensive house than they could actually afford. That is part of why household debt is so frighteningly high in Australia.

One of the aspects of the finance sector industry that was exposed is the practice of charging clients fees for no service. Banks and insurance companies and their financial planning and superannuation subsidiaries were found to be charging people “advice” and “service” fees for their investments and superannuation accounts but then providing no advice at all. Put simply, the banks and insurance companies were downright stealing from hundreds of thousands of their customers. AMP, NAB, CBA, ANZ and Westpac were found to be the worst offenders. The amount that these companies stole from their customers through fees for no service was officially estimated to be well over a billion dollars. The real figure could be even higher. Moreover, some of these institutions had even knowingly continued to charge their customers fees for no service … after they had died! The fees would then be paid out of the estate of the deceased customers – in other words, be paid largely by the close relatives of the deceased customers, most often their spouses and children. The Commonwealth Bank even knowingly charged one of their dead clients fees for “financial planning advice” for more than a decade after they died! Meanwhile, insurance giant AMP continued to charge some of their dead customers life insurance premiums.

A SLAP ON THE WRISTS FOR THE SWINDLING BANKS AND INSURANCE COMPANIES

The banking royal commission and the media coverage surrounding it tended to focus on atrocities committed against small business owners, farmers and other middle class customers – especially upper-middle class ones – or against better paid workers able to acquire substantial savings. Indeed, under the capitalist system the big capitalists – at the apex of which stand the bank owners – rip off the small-scale capitalist exploiters and all of them, while leaching the most from wage workers, skim off also from the middle class, even from the upper middle class. Yet, the people most hurt by the thieving greed of the banks and insurance companies are average income workers and especially lower-paid, casual and unemployed workers. They are the people most hurt by the banks charging large set fees as these fees often make up such a big proportion of their modest savings. It is poorly paid workers, retrenched workers and long term unemployed workers who are also the most burdened by the extortionate interest rates charged by banks in credit card accounts. It is the low income of these people which pushed them to get into debt in the first place, while the cruel interest rate they must pay off with their debts plus their meagre incomes ensures that many have little possibility of ever paying off these debts. And often desperate for credit, casual and unemployed workers, low income single mothers and people with disabilities are the most vulnerable to being ripped off by loan brokers and short term credit providers handing out loans with exorbitant interest rates.

The banking royal commission did hear about how insurance companies were using aggressive telemarketing and deceptive policies to rip off Aboriginal customers, many struggling on low incomes. It was told of how insurance companies operating in remote Aboriginal communities took advantage of language barriers and Aboriginal people’s tendency to be friendly and polite to sign up on the phone Aboriginal people to life and funeral insurance that they neither truly consented to nor even needed. One of the enterprises exposed for pushing unnecessary funeral insurance on Aboriginal people is the “Aboriginal Community Benefit Fund” (ABCF). With its name including “Aboriginal Community” and its use of a rainbow serpent image, ABCF gave the impression that it was an Aboriginal community-run organisation. But it was not! It was a private, profit-driven company that was neither owned nor managed by Aboriginal people. However, ABCF used the trust gained by the appearance of being a community-run organisation to push Aboriginal people into forking out large amounts for funeral insurance that they did not need. Thus ABCF often signed up healthy young Aboriginal woman in their twenties and early thirties for funeral insurance. They even pushed thousands of Aboriginal parents into getting funeral insurance for their babies in schemes that would cost up to $100,000 over a lifetime! ABCF owners then quietly excluded families of Aboriginal people who died from suicide from receiving payouts, thus ensuring that they would not to have to pay claims of a very large proportion of the insured children that actually did die young.

The banking royal commission did also hear snippets about the massive exploitation of low-income people by businesses handing out consumer leases and so-called payday loans – where people are lent money until their next pay check at massive interest rates. Aboriginal financial counsellor, Lynda Edwards, also told of how car dealers took advantage of the necessity for cars in remote areas to sell Aboriginal people dud cars with ultra-high interest loans. A report published a year ago by Flinders University detailed how one Aboriginal customer was made to pay $52,000 for an $18,000 car at an interest rate of 35% despite the fact that the over-priced used car stopped working long before the loan was repaid! Indeed, the royal commission was told of how some Aboriginal people had been charged even higher interest rates for car loans, rates of 48%!

Yet the nature of the Royal Commission was such that it did not compel those involved in such scams and high-interest loan pushing to defend their actions. As senior counsel assisting the commission, Rowena Orr QC, explained: “We will not be considering consumer leases, payday loans or in-store credit arrangements in these hearings because they do not fall within the terms of reference of the commission.” Put simply, the Royal Commission was not meant to truly protect the interests of low-income people from the predatory behaviour of banks, insurance firms and retail business owners. To the extent that the banking royal commission was not entirely about “restoring the credibility of the finance sector” or simply about allowing the furious masses to vent steam in a way that does not actually harm the interests of the finance industry bigwigs, the investigation was aimed at curbing the excesses of the bank owners in the interests of other sections of the capitalist class – including retail sector bigwigs, “small and medium size” enterprise bosses and big farm owners – as well as the more privileged sections of the middle class that the upper class rely on for social and political support. After all, the state in capitalist countries is an executive committee for managing the affairs of the capitalist labour-exploiting class as a whole. At times they have to slightly clip the wings of even their most powerful section – the finance sector bigwigs – in order to ensure the interests of the rich ruling class as a whole. But even here the Royal Commission’s impact was minimal. Sure, there were some stunning revelations of the depth of the banks and insurers’ greed and deceit. Several finance sector CEOs and directors also had to resign from their positions in the wake of the revelations and, mind you, then take away multi-million dollar severance pay and shareholdings, thank you very much. Yet Royal Commission head, Kenneth Hayne, did not recommend one single charge against any specific finance sector boss despite the fact that the hearings of the commission plainly showed that banks and insurance companies had stolen and swindled well over a billion dollars from hundreds of thousands of their customers. Instead, the commissioner handed over 24 recommendations to the regulators over instances of misconduct and charged them with the responsibility of considering any action. However, he refused to even name the people and institutions involved. And over a year since the final report of the commission was handed down, not a single finance sector boss has been charged let alone been put behind bars. Meanwhile, even after having promised to implement nearly all of Commissioner Hayne’s recommendations, the government has yet to even introduce legislation to turn several of the recommendations into law.

The more important point is that Commissioner Hayne’s report only recommended cosmetic changes to the finance sector. Cold calling of financial products over the phone was recommended to be banned and mortgage brokers would be required to act in the best interests of their customers (as if that is going to actually happen!). However, the economic power, profitability and overall impunity of the finance sector corporations will be largely untouched. In fact, the bank owners were so delighted with the outcome of the Royal Commission that the first stock market trading after the commissioner handed down his final report saw the share prices of the big four banks skyrocket by almost A$20 billion – their biggest one day rise ever!

The limp recommendations of the Royal Commission are, indeed, what the right-wing Australian government always intended to be the outcome. Indeed, the Liberal government was so intent on enhancing the reputation of the bank bosses that shortly before the Royal Commission was announced, they and the bank heads arranged for the bank bosses to send a letter to the government themselves calling for the Royal Commission! This enabled the government to put the bank bigwigs in good light by saying that the banks themselves wanted the inquiry. Indeed, the relationship between bank owners and the government is so cosy that the letter from the heads of the big four banks to the government calling for the Royal Commission was first sent in draft form to the then treasurer, Scott Morrison, to be vetted by him before being made an official letter the next day! Let’s not forget that the then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who, kicking and screaming, called the Royal Commission was himself the owner of an investment banking firm and later a managing director for the Australian arm of U.S. banking giant, Goldman Sachs.

In order to appease their working class base and appeal to widespread middle class public opinion, the ALP Opposition has been more critical of the banks than the Coalition government. But let us remember that when they were in government previously from 2007 to 2013, when some of the most blatant fraud by the finance sector companies was being committed, the ALP also did nothing to stop it. Today in the wake of the Royal Commission, the ALP only called for implementing its weak recommendations. Nothing more. The ALP are certainly not calling for putting the banks under state control or even under greater regulation. After all it was the former Hawke-Keating ALP government that carried out the biggest deregulation of the finance sector in Australian history. They removed the cap on the interest rates that banks could charge for home loans and abolished other controls on bank interest rates. In short, the Hawke-Keating Labor government freed up bank owners to do whatever it takes to maximise profits regardless of the consequences to society. Most harmfully, they also privatised the formerly state-owned Commonwealth Bank.

While the ALP is a party with a working class base, its futile program of trying to improve the lot of workers while accepting the capitalist order means that it necessarily needs to collaborate with – and ultimately kowtow to – that apex of capitalist power, finance capital. Thus, the ALP’s ties to the bank bosses are not far behind those of the conservatives. The investment banking firm that Malcolm Turnbull established, referred to above, was actually set up in a partnership with none other than former NSW ALP premier, Neville Wran, and Nicholas Whitlam – the son of former prime minister and ALP icon, Gough Whitlam. The bank was actually called Whitlam Turnbull & Co Ltd. Today, the CEO of the Australian Banking Association, who has done so much to deceive the population by being the chief apologist for the bank bosses is former Queensland ALP premier, Anna Bligh. Meanwhile, during the last financial year that disclosures of political donations have been revealed, 2018-19, the ALP received more than $2.5 million from Westpac alone! They were also given $50,000 from the main body representing general insurance firms, the Insurance Council of Australia, as well as plenty of other big donations from individual insurance companies and other banks. And that does not include the large amount of political donations that are disguised or hidden.

Of course, the banks and insurance companies also made big donations to the Liberal Party too. The Insurance Council of Australia gave them $27,500 and Anna Bligh’s Australian Banking Association the same amount. For its part, CBA donated $55,000. Westpac Bank donated a hefty $82,500 to the Liberals but that pales against their $2.5 million donations to the ALP during 2018-19. Likely, the Westpac bigwigs knew that they already had the Liberals fully in their bag!

THE MYTH THAT THE BIG CORPORATIONS ARE OWNED BY
“EVERYDAY AUSTRALIANS” THROUGH OUR SUPERANNUATION

The problem isn’t simply that the banks and other finance businesses sometimes engage in open theft from their customers and other deceptive conduct. It’s the normal working of these enterprises that is the main problem. Banks make their money by extracting fees from account holders and primarily by charging a higher interest rate on the loans that they give out than the rate that they pay depositors. And they leach a lot of money that way! In the 2018-19 financial year, the “big four” Australian banks and the three biggest Australian-owned insurance companies, IAG, Suncorp and QBE, together extracted nearly $29 billion from us and that’s not including the huge amounts also grabbed by smaller banks and insurers as well as by mortgage brokers, consumer lease providers and payday cash operators. And that was considered a bad year for them! All this money extracted by the finance sector businesses is like an extra tax on the masses. But it is a tax where the proceeds don’t go into the public budget but into the hands of the wealthy finance sector business owners. If we note that there are currently about 9.8 million households and then do a quick calculation we find that the biggest four Australian-owned banks and largest three Australian-owned insurers are leaching $3,000 in profit, on average, from each household every year. To put that in perspective, that is more than one in five dollars of what an unemployed single person receives in the Newstart Allowance (if one excludes the temporary increase to the Newstart Allowance granted during the Covid-19 pandemic)!

Most working class and middle class people are only too aware that “The Banks” are ripping us off. But who do we exactly mean when we talk about “The Banks” that leach from us. Most of us think of the CEOs and the directors that award themselves huge salary packages. And with good reason! Last year, Westpac’s CEO took home over $5 million, ANZ CEO Shayne Elliot even more and IAG CEO Peter Harmer topped the lot receiving a five and a half million dollars package. And that was all in a year when the bank bosses, aware that they were under the spotlight, wanted to pretend that that they were feeling contrition for their devious deeds by awarding themselves lower payments than usual!

Yet as obscene are the payments are to the bank executives, that is still only a small percentage of bank profits. Where else are banks gigantic earnings going? Certainly not to their rank and file employees! So let’s take a look at Australia’s biggest bank, CBA. Last financial year CBA had a total operating income of $24 billion. Some of it they spent on equipment, wages, occupancy and operating costs. Most of their income then, after paying tax, ends up as profit for their owners. Nearly $8.5 billion to be precise. Of that nearly a billion went to beef up the assets of the bank to help its owners make greater profits in the future and $7.6 billion was given as dividends to the banks shareholders, i.e. to the banks owners. That’s who is taking most of the wealth extracted from the masses by the banks. By contrast, the more than 48,000 employees of the CBA received $5.5 billion in salaries and superannuation, which is a lot less than the shareholders received for doing absolutely no work at all. The amount received by the bank employees is also less than a quarter of the bank’s overall operating income. And of these more than 48,000 employees, the majority of them, the rank and file employees – say at least 40,000 of the workers – would each receive small slices of the salary cake while the managers and executives each take gluttonously big slices. After all, the bank’s top executives and other directors (there are just 20 of them), alone were paid $40 million last year; and that is counted as a “staff” cost. By contrast the average salary package, including superannuation, of CBA’s other employees is $114,000 – which is 40 times less than what the CEO took home. Moreover, when you exclude the managers and others in the top 20% of highest paid staff who would bring up that average income number, one would find that the annual wage of the vast majority of CBA workers wouldn’t be much more than – and in many cases less than – $75,000 and certainly well below $100,000. Moreover, to the bank bigwigs, these bank workers are expendable. As soon as the bank bosses decide that they can make a still higher profit with fewer workers, they will throw into the dole queues the employees whose hard work has allowed bank executives and big shareholders to acquire such immense wealth. Over the last several years, the bigwigs of the big four banks have together retrenched tens of thousands of workers. In late 2017, then NAB CEO, Andrew Thorburn, infamously announced the axing of 6,600 jobs at the very same time that he gloatingly announced that the bank had made a whopping annual profit of $6.6 billion.

So, who then are the shareholders who are reaping the rewards of the banks’ ripping off of the masses’ money? The finance corporations’ bosses and their bigwigs try to sell us the line that their companies are owned mostly by superannuation funds and through the dividends distributed to these funds their profits end up going to “ordinary, everyday Australians.” Nothing could be further from the truth! But before exploring this point in more detail, it is important to here make a point about superannuation more broadly. Superannuation, as a means of distributing income to the aged, in contrast to pensions, is not fair. It is not fair not only in practice but in the very concept of it.

Under the superannuation system a proportion of people’s income (9.5% of their gross wage currently) when they are working goes into their personal accounts which gets managed by superannuation companies and is then accessible when they retire. So a worker on the minimum wage in a full-time job gets $3,467 of superannuation put into their account each year. By contrast, the Westpac CEO last year received $44,320 in superannuation payments, nearly 13 times more than a worker on the minimum wage gets. Many bosses get even more. Last year, the CEO of Australian-owned mining giant, BHP, received a staggering $425,000 in superannuation payments – that’s more than 120 times greater than what a worker on the minimum wage gets! By contrast if you are a worker unfortunate enough to be either unemployed or one of the increasing number of cash in hand workers or a domestic worker or a casual worker who gets only a few hours in a month of work you get no super whatsoever. Yet it is precisely these people who need higher payments when they are aged because they would have much less savings and assets than people who had been receiving higher superannuation contributions. Moreover, the superannuation system reinforces the discrimination in employment affecting women, Aboriginal people and migrants from African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries. For in addition to the gender pay gap that women endure, the racist discrimination that causes Aboriginal people to have a much higher rate of unemployment than the broader population and the greater propensity of migrants to only be given lower paid jobs, women and migrants are much more likely to be in non-super receiving cash in hand and domestic work jobs than their male and Australian-born counterparts.

There is one rationale for superannuation – that wealth produced today needs to be set aside for when we have an ageing population in the future – that does have validity. But this should be addressed by making the bosses pay into a single, common pension fund out of which aged pensions can be paid equally to all of the elderly. Instead of the system of low pensions supplemented by people’s individual superannuation accounts, there should be much higher pensions for all and no individual superannuation. At least when a group of people are at an age when none of them are working, they should finally get paid equally! The current system, instead, carries through all the terrible inequality when people are of working age through to when people are retired.

So given how unequal people’s superannuation balances are, even if it were true that the banks and other big corporations are owned mainly by superannuation funds this would be grossly unfair. However, the truth is even more inequitable. For it is the very rich who own most of the stocks of the banks and other big companies. Superannuation funds own just a minority. How small a minority? Let us calculate that here using publicly available data. Given how much mythology there is about superannuation funds owning corporations, we will show each stage of the calculation. According to the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia, i.e. the industry body of the superannuation companies themselves, at the end of December 2019 these funds had a total of 1.9 trillion dollars in assets of which 22.0% was invested in Australian equities (https://www.superannuation.asn.au/resources/superannuation-statistics , accessed 3 April 2020). That comes to a figure of $418 billion for the total holdings in the Australian share market by the superannuation funds. Now the total market capitalisation of the Australian share market at the same time, the end of December, was $2339.71 billion (see https://www.gurufocus.com/global-market-valuation.php?country=AUS and scroll to 20 December 2019 in the graph “Australian Total Market Cap”). That gives the proportion of the shares in the Australian stock market owned by domestic superannuation funds at just 17.9%. That is a lot less than one in five shares.

To see the significance of this truth that local superannuation funds own just a minority of major Australian corporations, let us consider the following scenario. Imagine in the year 2022, after having to prune their profits slightly in 2019 following the exposure of some of their fraudulent practices and the lower profits that they could expect in the coming two years in the wake of the COVID-19 induced recession, the banks seek to raise their profits back to the extreme levels of a few years ago. Through hitting their customers with still higher fees and by charging a high interest rate on the loans they lend out relative to that which they give to depositors the banks raise their profits by, say, an extra $10 billion. Now the bank bosses and their many apologists in parliament would then spin the line that these higher profits are a good thing as they end up in the pockets of “ordinary everyday Australians” through the dividends being accumulated by superannuation funds investing in the banks. However, if all these additional profits end up being distributed as dividends to shareholders and assuming that the percentage of bank shares owned by Australian super funds is about the same as the overall proportion of Australian stocks owned by these funds, just $1.79 billion of these extra share dividends would go to these funds. Even less would make their way into actual superannuation accounts. For the superannuation companies would take a healthy portion of the dividends as commissions and fees – and as we know even as advice fees when they give no advice! And guess what, many of these superannuation companies are themselves directly owned by banks or insurance companies. So part of the bank profits supposedly going into superannuation funds end up going back to the bank and, thus, into the pockets of its big non-superannuation shareholders. The amount actually going to the superannuation accounts of the public may be closer to $1.4 billion. Yet, to get to this scenario of higher bank profits, we have paid out $10 billion in extra fees and higher interest payments. So, excluding the big shareholders of the banks, the public end up much worse off overall, worse off by about $10 billion less the approximately $1.4 billion that we reclaim in higher returns on our super; i.e. we together end up about overall $8.6 billion worse off. And it is working class people who would suffer the pain disproportionately. For a low-paid worker, while paying the higher fees and higher interest rates paid by others, gets very little back in the way of higher returns on their superannuation and many workers none at all.

While we are dealing with this subject, the same analogy would apply to the issue of wages and profits. If the bosses managed to drive down our wages throughout the economy so that they collectively make a $10 billion higher profit than they otherwise would, the apology that business leaders give, that this ends up back in workers’ pockets through increases to their superannuation, is completely false. Wage and salary earners would collectively end up about $8.6 billion worse off. And again the pain would be borne most by lower paid, cash-in-hand and unemployed workers. So, the next time a co-worker, who has been influenced by ruling class propaganda, tries to tell you that higher profits for banks and other corporations is good for us, please, please, please educate them about the reality!

WHO ARE “THE BANKS”?

So now that it is clear that we are not the indirect owners of the banks through our superannuation funds, who then are the actual owners of these hated corporations? The second lie that apologists for the banks promote, other than the one about superannuation funds, is that the banks are simply owned by “ordinary, everyday Australians” – so called “mum and dad shareholders.” This is actually an even bigger lie than the first one! Why? Firstly, most working class people don’t have the significant savings that would enable them to invest in the stock market. Low paid workers, unemployed workers and casual workers struggle to replace worn out clothes, deal with high electricity costs, pay the rent and often keep up with credit card debts too, let alone save significants amounts of money. Meanwhile, more decently paid workers often spend most of their working life paying off their home mortgage. Far from the majority of the working class being able to invest in shares, the reality is that household debt in Australia is at record levels. A small layer of better paid, more skilled and often older workers do sometimes invest in shares or alternatively in wealth management schemes that in turn invest in shares. However, most of the people holding shares are members of the capitalist, business-owning upper class and the more comfortable layers of the middle class – especially high-paid, upper-middle class professionals. So the “mum and dad shareholders” who supposedly hold most of the banks should more precisely be referred to as the “affluent mum and dad shareholders.” However, even this tells only a small part of the story. For average middle class shareholders – and even the upper middle class ones – while they are large in number only hold a very small portion of bank ownership. To see this, let us have a look at the latest annual report, the one for 2019, for Australia’s largest bank, CBA. According to the bank’s own report, those owning less than a 1,000 shares, who make up nearly three quarters of shareholders, own just one in ten of all shares. Now, given that the share price of the bank at the time that those figures were quoted for (15 July 2019) was $81.06, any one shareholder who was not in this category, i.e. was a shareholder who had more than 1,000 shares in the bank, had more than $81,060 invested there. These big investors who each invested more than $81,060 in the bank own 90% of the bank. Few workers and average middle class people could afford to put that kind of money in the shares of one company. Moreover, even amongst the upper middle class and wealthy capitalists who own most of the bank shares, it is the latter who own the lion’s share. Thus, the people and institutions who own more than 5,000 shares – that is who have the spare cash to invest more than $405,000 in the shares of just one company – own over two-thirds of the CBA. Moreover, the top 20 shareholders alone own nearly half the bank!

So who then are these very rich individuals owning most of Australia’s banks? That is censored information! The wealthy own much of their stakes in the finance sector through other banks acting as nominees for them. In other words, these rich investors get other banks to hold shares on their behalf in a way that hides their own identities. Without exception, in Australia’s big four banks at least the top six shareholders in each bank are these bank nominee holders. In the case of ANZ, all the top eight shareholders, who own 57% of the bank, are these nominee holders. That about typifies the nature of “democracy” within capitalist countries. The ruling class talk a lot about “transparency” but really it is only things that don’t matter too much that are transparent whereas the really important stuff is hidden from the masses. So here we have the most powerful economic institutions in the country, the ones who decide how credit is distributed and whose combined assets of $3.4 trillion (for the big four banks alone) are almost twice the country’s entire annual GDP … and we don’t even really know who owns them!

We do, however, know a few things about the major owners of the Australian banks and insurance companies. One thing that we do know is that they are rich Australians rather than people from overseas. CBA, for instance, is nearly four-fifths Australian-owned. You can bet that among the major owners of the banks and insurance companies, hidden through bank nominee holders, are many of Australia’s richest 200 people – capitalists whose combined wealth last year was found to be a staggering $342 billion! So if you managed to break through the secrecy wall of nominee holdings you would surely find that among the major shareholders of the banks would be people of the ilk of Andrew Forrest, Gina Rinehart, James Packer, Anthony Pratt, Clive Palmer and Kerry Stokes.

The $160 million mega-yacht bought in 2017 by financial executive John Symond. Symond is one of the largest individual shareholders of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The ultra-rich Australian owners and executives of Australia’s banks and other finance sector companies leach billions off the masses while the institutions that they control misdirect credit away from the areas most needed by working class people.
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Where there is greater transparency is in the holdings of the executives and directors of these finance sector corporations. And they do have big shareholdings. ANZ CEO, Shayne Elliot, held nearly $5 million of shares in that bank. IAG boss, Peter Harmer, owned an even larger stake in his corporation, owning $7.6 million of shares. However, compared to the murky holdings held in secret by nominee companies, even these huge numbers are pretty small. One big bank shareholder who is not hidden behind a nominee company is the couple, Barry and Joy Lambert, who at the time of the CBA’s last annual report owned a whopping $220 million dollar stake. Joy and Barry Lambert are indeed, by the way, a “mum” and a “dad” – and these are precisely the type of “Australian mums and dads shareholders” that own the lion’s share of this country’s banks and other major corporations!

THE BIG BANKS, BIG INSURERS & THE OWNERS OF SMALLER FINANCE COMPANIES

What about the institutions holding major stakes in the big finance corporations – that is, other than the companies acting as nominees for others? One such institutional investor, which is among the top twenty shareholders of each of Australia’s big four banks as well as of the big insurers, Suncorp and QBE, is Netwealth Investments. If we look at the last annual reports of these big finance corporations, we find that at that time, Netwealth held a total stake of $814 million in them. Now Netwealth Investments are a wealth management firm, so they are largely investing the money of other capitalists and upper middle class individuals in the big finance corporations. But Netwealth also takes a big chunk out of the money invested through these shareholdings as commissions and management fees. And who owns Netwealth? More than half of it is owned by the joint managing directors of the firm, Michael Heine and his son Matt. The last published Australian rich list has the family holding a combined wealth of more than $1.5 billion. As we can see, a big part of this wealth comes from grabbing a share of the profits that the banking and insurance corporations leach out of all of us.

So there you have it, the big banks and insurance companies act as a big collective feeding trough for capitalist pigs. Different capitalist exploiters come to put their snouts into the mega-earnings extracted by the big banks and insurers. And when they do so, they get a huge feed. The last CBA annual report, for example, boasted that shareholders gained a total return on their investments of 21% in just one year. That means, for instance, that the Lambert family’s stake in the bank would have given them a $46 million return in just one year … and that from doing no work whatsoever! By contrast a full-time cleaner doing hard and especially crucial and dangerous work at this time of pandemic will get 1,200 times less than this and only if her boss actually pays her the minimum wage.

The Heine family who own Netwealth are one of many owners of smaller finance sector businesses that have made a fortune by engaging in a similar kind of parasitism as the big banks do. At least fifteen of the people on Australia’s list of the richest 200 people extracted much of their money by running such enterprises. You very often see these people being interviewed on ABC current affairs programs related to the economy, which is worth noting for anyone who thinks that the ABC is substantially fairer and more independent of capitalist influence than the tycoon-owned media outlets. Among the finance sector bigwigs are Hamish Douglass, the biggest shareholder of wealth management firm, Magellan Financial; Jeff Chapman, owner of Bennelong Funds Management; Graham Tuckwell, owner of investment management firm, ETF Securities; David Paradice, owner of Paradice Investment Management and Kerr Neilson, the billionaire who owns the main stake in Platinum Asset Management. Supporters of public housing may recognise the latter name. Neilson was one of the ultra-rich people who notoriously bought up former public housing and publicly-owned buildings in Sydney’s inner-city Millers Point after the right-wing NSW government drove out low-income working class tenants and sold off the housing to wealthy individuals and speculators. In 2018, Neilson bought up three historic dwellings in Millers Point, known collectively as the George Talbots Townhouses, for $5 million.

The $30.5 million Point Piper mansion bought in 2014 by Nick Langley, owner of investment management firm RARE Infrastructure. Australia’s banks and other finance sector companies are largely owned by filthy rich capitalists and not by “everyday mum and dad shareholders.”

Another filthy rich owner of a finance sector corporation is the boss of buy-now-pay-later company, Flexigroup, Andrew Abercrombie. Abercrombie is also a Liberal Party powerbroker and major donor and is notorious for having stridently supported right-wing extremist, media commentator Andrew Bolt, when Aboriginal people took legal action against Bolt over vile racist slurs. Recently, Abercrombie was in the news after a high-society party that he hosted at his extravagant chalet in the US Aspen ski resort became the source of COVID-19 infection clusters after several of the super-rich guests refused to self-isolate and after returning to Australia spread the disease acquired at the party to Melbourne, Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula and Sydney.

Many of the finance sector bosses in Australia’s rich list run businesses that not only make profits from operations here but also leach profits from people overseas. That is to be expected from major components of a ruling class that is not only capitalist but imperialist. However, as well as making profits from their own operations, these owners of smaller finance sector companies stand alongside mining magnates, media moguls and industrial capitalists in grabbing hefty slices of the loot extracted by the operations of the big banks and big insurers. This is both through their own major shareholdings in the banks – like those of the Lambert family who made their initial wealth through Barry Lambert’s previously owned financial planning company, Count Financial – and through gaining a big slice of the dividends from bank shares received by the funds that they manage. In this sense, the big banking and insurance companies operate like a legal, crime syndicate. Different, loosely connected capitalists come together through these corporations to jointly loot the masses.

NATIONALISE THE BANKS! NATIONALISE THE ENTIRE HEALTH SYSTEM!

The banks extract money from the masses in four different ways. The first two ways are obvious: through charging interest and fees and through exploiting the mental labour of their own workers. Thirdly, by lending to those buying investment properties, banks, from the interest that they receive, gain a share of the rent extracted by greedy landlords from tenants. There is also an important additional way that banks extract their revenue. For banks, insurance companies and investment managers put some of the money under their control into the shares and bonds of other businesses. In the case of banks they also make loans to these other firms. These other business bosses, whether they be those of manufacturing firms, retailers, developers, telecommunication and IT firms, transportation companies, mining corporations or agribusiness operations in turn make a profit through exploiting their own workers. Part of the wealth extracted from these workers is then returned to the banks as interest on loans and on any bonds held by the banks and also returned to finance sector firms more broadly as dividends on the stocks that they hold in these other companies. In this way, the owners of the finance sector companies gain a share of the profits exploited from workers throughout the economy.

This role of the finance sector – and the banks in particular – in the whole economy points to perhaps the biggest problem with the capitalist-owned finance sector. It is not simply that they leach from the people, it is also the way that they allocate credit and financial resources. And like everything else they do, they allocate credit almost solely on the basis of what can bring them the highest returns. That is partly why there is so much speculation in the housing sector and so little affordable housing available, both to buy or to rent. Banks know that they can gain much higher and more secure returns by giving loans to wealthy people buying multiple holiday homes and speculative high-end investment properties than to lend for the construction of cheaper housing for working class people to buy or to rent. Similarly, banks would rather allocate loans and investments to climate change-inducing coal mines and fossil fuel power stations that have little long term future than to focus their credit allocation into renewable power projects even if the former bring only slighter higher and more secure returns to the bank. Meanwhile, the profit-driven mode of the banks mean that medical research in Australia can struggle to get funding unless the chances of an immediate profit-making breakthrough are immediate. Yet medical science cannot but advance except through the trialling of many different ideas, only a tiny proportion of which will end up being used. Similarly in Australia, important technological development and scientific research – especially in basic sciences where the monetary benefits are not immediate – struggle to get bank loans or investment. By contrast, casino operators and advertising firms – who produce no net benefit to society but instead only help one lot of business owners to get richer at the expense of their rivals (and then vice versa!) – don’t seem to have any trouble raising credit.

One of the growing number of people in Australia forced to sleep the streets. A major reason for the large amount of homelessness is that Australia’s profit-driven banks, rather than directing credit to the building of public housing and housing affordable for the poor, divert credit to more lucrative high-end housing projects as well as for speculative housing investments.
Photo credit: ABC

If the misdirection of credit causes terrible problems in “normal” times, it can be literally fatal at a time of public health emergency and economic implosion like we are experiencing right now. Although, as we go to press, the rate of new infections in Australia appears to be slowing, people continue to die from COVID-19 and, what is more, the threat of much greater virus spread will emerge once social distancing measures are eased. That is why immediately, we need financial resources directed to urgent medical research to help find vaccines and better treatments for COVID-19. We need this research not only for the few projects seemingly most likely to bring financial profits in the future but for a wide range of research. That includes work into developing any non-vaccine treatment methods for the virus. Such research into treatment methods can be hugely life-saving but its results are also likely non-patentable and would bring the researchers – and thus their bank creditors – no real financial rewards. Even more urgently we need loans directed to particular manufacturers that are able to very quickly turn their factories into making personal protective equipment, infra-red thermometers, virus testing kits and ventilators. We also need credit being allocated into areas that will help reduce the level of job losses and at the same time direct jobs into areas that would aid the virus response – for instance by making home delivery of groceries and food more widespread. Yet the only way any of this has even a chance of happening is if control of the organisations that have the power over lending – that is, the banks – are taken out of the hands of their profit-driven owners and brought under state control. This gives the potential to plan the allocation of financial resources to both respond to the virus threat and avert economic collapse. For such planning to be effective, the banks really need to be run together as a single national entity. Modern computing technology and big data make that quite simple whether or not the banks actually operate under one logo. In summary what we need is the nationalisation of the banks and their conversion into a single state-run bank. We need that right now and we need that all the time!

Putting the banks under state control is not the only thing that the working class masses need right now. To respond to the COVID-19 threat we need health resources mobilised in a planned way. The government has announced that it would requisition the resources of private hospitals to deal with the crisis. But this measure is partial and predicated on a massive bailout of private hospital owners. In contrast to the Morrison government’s half-baked hospital plan we need the immediate nationalisation of the entire health system – including not only private hospitals but smaller health facilities like pathology labs. This must remain even after this epidemic is over. Having a big part of the Medicare budget going into the bank accounts of greedy private health operators – for example, Medicare pays 75% of the schedule fee of private patients – as opposed to the actual treatment of patients not only drains the public budget but means that less resources are available for the long overdue tasks of increasing the number of available public hospital beds and public health nurses and reducing the waiting times at public hospitals. Furthermore, for the level of one’s access to health care to depend on the “logic of the market” – in other words how much money one has to fork out for health care – goes against the needs of the working class and all principles of decency. The irrationality of having health facilities being run by for profit operators has been proved during this COVID-19 crisis by the fact that private health care operators like Healthe Care in March stood down, or laid off, hundreds of nurses at a time when the virus was spreading rampantly and nurses were needed more than ever.

The section of Australia’s population most vulnerable to contracting COVID-19 is the well over hundred thousand homeless people. This includes not only those forced to sleep the streets but those “couch surfing” in the homes of friends and relatives. With so many people thrown out of work or stood down on reduced or no pay, homelessness is set to skyrocket. The government’s tentative six-month moratorium on evictions does not provide adequate security to tenants. There are so many loopholes that landlords are already evicting tenants. Moreover, current measures do not stop landlords and estate agents from pressuring tenants to pay rent even when they have little income. Therefore, there must be a six month halt to all rent payments for residential tenants from now. We also need an immediate halt to the sell-off of public housing and for homeless people to be housed in public housing dwellings slated for sale. This will help but will not in itself be enough to house all homeless people. Therefore, we also need a massive increase in public housing. Another crucial reason why we need more public housing is so that low-income women can move away from any abusive relationships and know that they will still have a roof over their heads if they do so. This is an even more urgent matter now than ever as COVID-19 restrictions are leaving women copping domestic abuse in situations where they are more socially isolated and, thus, more vulnerable to violent attack. But new public housing cannot be built fast enough right now in the midst of a pandemic. Therefore, the state must requisition the unoccupied holiday homes and investment properties of people owning more than three homes and convert them immediately into public housing.

We must also demand that the millions of casual workers in this country be immediately granted permanency with all the rights of permanent workers – including being granted guaranteed minimum work hours and sick leave. This is necessary to both protect the rights of casual workers and to ensure that such workers have no compulsion to risk their own well-being and that of others by going to work when ill. Similarly, we must ensure that all workers be granted special paid pandemic leave for self-isolation, quarantining and treatment if they may have COVID-19, or to care for ill family members. The government’s new scheme only allows for unpaid leave which for many low-paid workers will not only cause hardship but may push them to try sticking it out at work when they could be a risk to themselves and others.

At this time of economic crisis, temporary migrant workers and wage-working international students are the hardest hit section of the working class. Many have lost jobs or are casual workers who have suffered big cuts to the number of shifts that they get and, like most casual workers, the government’s much touted scheme to pay bosses of businesses that have lost significant revenue to retain workers will not help them at all. Moreover, unlike all other workers they will not get any Centrelink payments and international students are not even covered by Medicare. This is outrageous! These migrant workers face destitution and many now not only have no money to return to their home countries but cannot even do so due to travel restrictions. That is why it is absolutely urgent that we demand that all workers resident here get the same rights as people who are citizens. Full citizenship rights for everyone who is here! Moreover, in counter-position to the government’s JobKeeper scheme that will still allow hundreds of thousands of workers to lose their jobs while giving a windfall to many bosses, we must fight for jobs for all through preventing companies that have been making a profit over the years from cutting their workforce and by forcing still profitable companies to increase hiring at the expense of their profits.

Such an agenda can only be won through working class-led struggle. Although, at this moment, it may even be from the point of view of the overall interests of the capitalist class partly rational to put the banks under state control in order to avert an economic collapse, the exploiting class will resist any demands for such measures, not least because such a nationalisation would immediately pose the question that if the capitalist owners cannot be trusted to run the banks themselves then why shouldn’t the banks and the rest of the economy be taken completely out of their hands and put into public ownership. As a crucial part of any working-class fightback the workers movement must champion the cause of all other sections of the oppressed. In particular the working class must support Aboriginal people’s struggle against racist state killings of black people in custody, a movement that has been injected with renewed energy in the wake of the mass anti-racist resistance struggles in the U.S.

Mass struggle at this time of pandemic is, of course, difficult. However, let’s not forget that the working class movement has had to struggle in the past – and often in the present too in not only openly capitalist dictatorships but to some degree in the so-called “democracies” as well – in difficult conditions where protests, strikes and leftist political activity have faced repression or even been outright outlawed. This time of virus-related restrictions is, of course, very different in that we ourselves uphold – and actually actively promote – genuine social-distancing measures. However, like in times of intense of police-state repression, it is still a matter of finding ways to overcome major obstacles. We certainly don’t need to come up with all the ways that we can have an impact here. Politically active working class people will themselves come up with suitable methods – the masses are very innovative and that has been proven over decades and decades of struggle.

STATE-CONTROLLED BANKS AND COVID-19 RESPONSE: A CASE STUDY

If anyone wants to see why we need to put the banks under state control they should look at how the finance sector works in the world’s most populous country – and Australia’s biggest trading partner – the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). In China all the major banks are nationalised. And that was part of why the PRC was so effectively able to respond to the COVID-19 threat. Although China was the place where the virus – whose exact origin remains unknown – first spread in a really big known way, the PRC was able to respond so effectively and quickly that today in China, and even in the city of Wuhan, the former centre of the outbreak, people are again socialising, starting to resume eating out at cafes and restaurants, travelling long distances on public transport, slowly returning to tourist sites, working at factories and other works sites and gradually returning to full school operations. More importantly, the PRC’s response has been so successful that per million residents, far less people have died from the virus in China than have died in wealthier countries that have had much, much more time to prepare for the virus spread. Thus, the number of deaths per resident as of July 18 is already 45% higher in Australia than in China, 133 times higher in the U.S. than in China and in Switzerland, the country famous for its free-wheeling, scantily regulated capitalist banks, the number of deaths per resident is already 71 times higher than in China.

It is important to see why the PRC has been able to respond so effectively to the virus threat. In particular let us see how having a nationalised banking sector made a difference. Crucially, as soon as it become apparent just how contagious and deadly the then newly discovered virus was, China’s banks started supplementing PRC government outlays to firms to boost production of – or in many cases to entirely switch over the output of their operations to produce – items crucial to the epidemic response. Such products included surgical masks, goggles and full protective suits for medical workers, face masks for the public, COVID-19 testing kits, ambulances, disinfectant and ventilators. Within two weeks, PRC banks had already lent out tens of billions of dollars in very low interest rate loans to support the production of these items. By March 13, the amount that the PRC’s state-controlled banks had lent out to contain the impact of the virus had grown to $330 billion!

Left: Medical workers in full head-to-toe, spacesuit-style protective gear at Wuhan’s Fan Cang Makeshift Hospital in February 2020. Right: Medical workers at Tasmania’s North West Regional Hospital. Australian health workers have usually not been provided with the same level of protective gear that medical workers in China have been equipped with. Often the faces and necks of Australian health workers are left exposed and sometimes they are only equipped with normal face masks rather than surgical grade N95 masks. As a result, the coronavirus transferred from infected patients to medical staff at Tasmania’s North West Regional Hospital causing an outbreak that took eleven lives. Moreover, as of 21 July 2020, 429 health workers have been infected with COVID-19 in Victoria alone. The capitalist system is unable to ensure the switching over of production to meet pandemic response needs anywhere as decisively as a system dominated by public ownership, like that in the PRC.
Photo credit (photo on Right): Mitchell Woolnough

The production of pandemic relief goods – especially PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) for medical workers – is absolutely vital in the fight against this pandemic. Unfortunately, in the very early days of the outbreak in Wuhan, before it was realised just how contagious the virus was – and even what it was – and how crucial was the need for protective gear, many medical staff in Wuhan became infected with the virus and also spread it to other colleagues, and several of the infected staff later died. In late January, with a large number of ill people pouring into Wuhan hospitals the hospital system in Wuhan was obviously overwhelmed and there was a shortage of protective gear, medicine and equipment. However, before long, with PRC manufacturers, armed with cheap credit doled out at lightning speed by her nationalised banks, rapidly switching over to producing protective gear, all nurses, hospital cleaners and doctors in China were wearing full space-suit-style head-to-toe protective gear. As a result, not a single one of the more than 42,600 health workers who travelled from other parts of China to Hubei Province to aid the virus response became infected, let alone died from the disease. By contrast, the capitalist countries with their private, profit-driven banks have not been able to equip their health workers with PPE effectively. Capitalist banks resist any loans that do not guarantee them a sizable and secure return. Moreover, they would also take considerable time approving any loans made for epidemic response as they ponder and calculate what they can get out of lending large amounts to any particular project for manufacturing epidemic prevention materials. In Australia, any switching over of production to aid the pandemic response by manufacturers is happening way too little and way too late. Therefore, even though authorities in countries like the U.S., Australia and Italy have had the big advantage of knowing for several weeks, if not months, just how infectious the virus was before it spread widely in their own countries, they have not even been able to ensure adequate protective equipment for their health workers. In the U.S., many nurses have had to resort to wearing home-made “protective gear,” like garbage bags, as poor substitutes for personal protective equipment. In Italy, as of April 17, at least 159 medical workers had died from COVID-19. Apart from the personal tragedies here, the effects of health workers becoming infected is devastating for the overall pandemic response. It means that large numbers of medical staff are not able to contribute to the response effort as they languish in quarantine, while other doctors and nurses, before they are identified as having COVID-19, end up passing on the virus to other medical staff and to patients who have come in for non-COVID-19 illnesses. In Australia, the failure to be able to outfit all health workers with the head-to-toe PPE that China’s nurses, doctors and janitors are equipped with has meant that as of July 18 over 400 nurses, doctors and health workers in Victoria alone have been infected. The failure to provide adequate PPE for health and aged care workers is also a key reason for the deadly virus spreads in North-West Tasmanian hospitals and in the Christian-run nursing home in Sydney’s Outer West that took the lives of 30 people between them.

BUILD TOWARDS THE FUTURE CONFISCATION OF THE BANKS,
INDUSTRY, MINES, COMMUNICATIONS INFRASTRUCTURE & AGRICULTURAL LAND
& THEIR TRANSFER INTO PUBLIC OWNERSHIP

It is not only in responding to the direct virus threat that the PRC’s nationalised banks have come into their own. To avert mass layoffs and economic shocks during this pandemic, China’s banks have sacrificed profits by rolling over and extending loans to hard-hit firms and self-employed people and by lending large amounts of money at low interest rates to assist enterprises to re-start production with the curbing of the epidemic spread. In a similar way, the PRC’s nationalised banking sector played a crucial role in allowing China to sail through the late noughties Global Recession as they lent huge amounts of money to finance high-speed rail lines, water conservation projects, environmental projects and the massive construction of low-rent public housing.

Yet it is not just during a crisis that the advantages of the PRC’s state-controlled finance sector is apparent. These Chinese banks have been directed to ensure that their lending practices are in lockstep with the PRC’s “Homes Are For Living In, Not for Speculation” policy. Thus, they have provided much credit to support public housing construction. Moreover, very different to Australia’s profit-obsessed banks, China’s banks charge any family seeking a bank loan for buying a second home a much higher interest rate than they charge those buying their first home, while they don’t lend at all to anyone trying to buy a third home. More broadly, China’s state-controlled banks are directed to lend to projects that may not be very profitable for the banks but which are important for the society and for the people’s economic development. Thus, these banks have specially lent to research and development projects in areas that are important for that country’s future economic progress like nanotechnology, advanced materials, artificial intelligence, advanced electronic hardware, aircraft research etc. Meanwhile, given that the PRC state has identified environmental protection as one of its three principal tasks, alongside poverty alleviation and curbing financial risks, the banks have directed a significant part of their lending to projects aimed at curbing water and air pollution. In particular, by supporting renewable energy projects with credit, they have helped China to become the world leader in renewable energy, with more than three times the installed solar power capacity of any other country and more than twice the wind generation capacity of the next biggest wind power producer. However, the most crucial practice of the PRC’s nationalised banking sector is its support for the country’s poverty alleviation drive. Over the last several years, as part of the PRC’s drive to lift every resident out of extreme poverty by the end of 2020, China’s state banks have lent literally hundreds of billions of dollars to poverty alleviation projects in poorer parts of the country. Many of these projects involve renovation of shantytowns and upgrading of infrastructure in impoverished and remote parts of the country as well as supporting community-based aged care facilities provided for lower income residents. Crucially, the PRC’s state-controlled banks have also provided credit for the development of job-creating industries in poorer, rural parts of the country including food processing operations, agricultural co-operatives, rural tourism and renewable energy projects. Partly as a result of such support for her poverty alleviation drive from her nationalised finance sector, China remains on track to achieve her poverty alleviation target by the end of this year despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is important to be aware that the PRC’s banks are not just state-controlled, they are overwhelmingly also state-owned. Thus, each and every one of China’s big four commercial banks are state-owned. Indeed, even if we include all the medium-sized banks in China, we find that majority state-owned banks so dominate the PRC’s finance sector that there is really only one significant sized bank – China’s tenth largest bank – that can be considered to be truly privately-owned; and even in that one case state-owned companies have recently become its largest shareholders owning around a quarter of the bank. Moreover, in addition to her commercial banks, the PRC has three massive, 100% state-owned policy banks whose lending is completed devoted to projects that are deemed in society’s overall interest. Two of these policy banks in particular, the China Development Bank and the Agricultural Development Bank of China, whose combined assets would make them China’s second largest bank, have been at the forefront of lending to support China’s poverty alleviation drive and more recently for the pandemic response effort.

There is a notable difference between banks being merely state-controlled and being actually state-owned. For one, even if banks are state-controlled, if they remain privately-owned their wealthy owners will act as a constant pressure on the state pushing for the banks to be run largely according to the profit motive as opposed to according to social needs. Secondly, if banks remain only state-controlled their massive profits would still be flowing into the hands of their largely ultra-rich owners rather than into the public budget. Remember, last year, in a “bad” year for them, Australia’s big four banks alone leached $26 billion in profits. To be sure, if they became state-controlled their profits would drop somewhat as their lending and investment becomes partially re-directed away from areas that simply bring the highest return. Nevertheless, even if their profits were halved as a result of being placed under state control, that’s still $13 billion that could go into the public budget if these corporations were only brought into state ownership. How much badly needed public housing could we get with that?! Well, actually, we can calculate that. According to the government’s own figures (see Table 18A.43 in the appendix of Excel spreadsheets under Part G, Section 18 of the Report on Government Services 2020 in the Australian Government Productivity Commission website https://www.pc.gov.au/research/ongoing/report-on-government-services/2020/housing-and-homelessness/housing), the average annual cost of a public house unit, including the capital cost, is $39,714 per dwelling. So if we had even half the current profits extracted by the biggest banks in Australia go into the public coffers we could support an extra 327,340 public housing dwellings which would easily more than double the existing stock of public housing. That could really solve the problem of homelessness and make good strides towards addressing the extreme shortage of low-rent housing in Australia.

That is why what is finally needed is to confiscate all the banks, insurance corporations, superannuation companies, wealth management firms and securities businesses from their ultra-wealthy owners and bring them all into state-ownership. This should be accomplished without giving any compensation to the big shareholders. However, to avoid unnecessarily antagonising the middle class, the stock holdings of the numerous small shareholders who together own a tiny fraction of these corporations can be bought out. Since the superannuation firms will be confiscated too, workers won’t need to worry about losing their super when the banks get taken. They will still get their retirement funds from the now publicly owned providers and with less eaten in fees by billionaire finance sector bosses to boot. However, the retirement payment system will progressively be switched from one based on individual superannuation accounts to one based on a higher and equal pension for all.

Our agitational demand to put the banks under state control, that is to nationalise the banks, that we made in the headline of this article, is not in itself a call to confiscate the banks and put them into public ownership. Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin made a similar call some six weeks prior to the working class seizure of power in the October 1917 Russian Revolution. As Lenin explained:

“It is absurd to control and regulate deliveries of grain, or the production and distribution of goods generally, without controlling and regulating bank operations….
“The ownership of the capital wielded by and concentrated in the banks is certified by printed and written certificates called shares, bonds, bills, receipts, etc. Not a single one of these certificates would be invalidated or altered if the banks were nationalised, i.e. if all banks were amalgamated into a single state bank…. whoever owned fifteen million rubles would continue after the nationalisation of the banks to have fifteen million rubles in the form of shares, bonds, bills, commercial certificates and so on.

V.I. Lenin, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, September 1917

Lenin’s Bolsheviks made the demand for the nationalisation of the banks in this period as an urgent measure to control economic life at a time when Russia’s masses were being struck down by mass unemployment, disorganised industry and terrible shortages of food and other staple items. However, the revolutionaries also understood that by showing the masses the need to take the control of the banks out of the hands of the capitalists they were thus leading working class people to the conclusion that they ultimately need to also take the ownership of the banks from the capitalists. Indeed, in the period after the October Revolution, the new workers government of Soviet Russia confiscated the banks along with the railways, industries and agricultural land and transferred them into public ownership.

Putting the banks under state control or even confiscating the finance sector, while a vital measure, does not solve all problems – not even the most urgent ones. So while we need state banks to lend to certain manufacturers to aid them to switch their operations to produce vitally needed pandemic relief goods, if the manufacturing bosses still can’t find a way to make a big profit out of those operations, even with low-interest loans, they are very unlikely to change over their factories; and if they do many would do it too slowly or only in a token way to gain positive publicity. So we need to have a perspective of confiscating not only the finance sector but also taking the key industries, the mines that produce the raw materials, transport and distribution means, power, communications and other infrastructure as well as construction out of the hands of the profit-driven capitalists and placing them into the collective hands of the people. In China it is not just their banks that are under state-ownership but all their key sectors. As a result when there was a need for firms to switch over their production to make pandemic relief goods, the relevant state-owned enterprises not only got access to cheap credit to assist them but were basically ordered to make the conversion. That is why you have all sorts of Chinese industries, seemingly unrelated to making protective and medical gear, contributing to China’s pandemic relief effort. For example, state-owned Shanghai Three Gun group, China’s biggest producer of underwear, is now producing more than one million masks per day.

What a society where public ownership plays the backbone role can do was seen most clearly in the way that the PRC built two large brand new hospitals from the ground up in less than two weeks when the number of people getting seriously ill from COVID-19 started surging in late January. The challenge in building these hospitals in Wuhan so quickly was especially steep given that these specialist infectious disease hospitals, unlike other hospitals, needed to have negative pressure wards to ensure that the air leaving wards with the infected patients is ejected safely rather than seeping out to potentially infect hospital workers and others. The first of these hospitals put into service, the 1,000 bed Huoshenshan (“Fire God Mountain”) Hospital was built in just 10 days. The second, the 1,600 bed Leishenshan (“Thunder God Mountain”) Hospital was put into service just days later. And it was thousands of workers organised through the PRC firms under public ownership that played the key role in pulling off these amazing feats. Financing for the project was provided both from the central government and by the 100% state-owned policy bank, the China Development Bank. The design of the hospital was performed by the CITIC General Institute of Architectural Design and Research, a subsidiary of the giant PRC public-owned conglomerate, CITIC. The actual construction of the hospitals was undertaken by the Third Engineering Bureau of state-owned China State Construction Engineering, the largest construction company in the world. Meanwhile, China State Grid organised 260 workers in around the clock shifts to ensure that the power connection was ready in time. Communications within the hospital and a stable 5G internet connection was achieved within 36 hours through a collaborative effort of China’s state-owned communication giants China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom and China Tower. Meanwhile, CT scanning equipment and X-rays were provided by Shanghai United Imaging, a high-tech firm jointly held by a range of PRC state-owned firms.

18 February 2020: One of the first two patients to recover from COVID-19 at the Leishenshan infectious disease hospital in China’s Wuhan says farewell to nurses and doctors. The specialised 1,600 bed Leishenshan Hospital was built in less than two weeks by the Third Engineering Bureau of China State Construction Engineering, one of China’s huge socialistic state-owned enterprises.

Right now the mass of working class people in Australia does not yet appreciate the need for the confiscation of the banks and industry from the capitalists and their transfer into public ownership. The very most politically advanced workers and leftist activists do understand that this is what is needed. However, ruling class propaganda has been able to tentatively convince the majority of working class people that private ownership of the economy should be “respected.” Nevertheless, right now there is widespread distrust of the banking system at the very same moment that many working class people are very worried about the pandemic, about whether they will have a job and about their ability to pay rent and buy essentials. That is why we today emphasise the call for the nationalisation of the banks as a slogan around which to mobilise united front struggle that will, on the one hand, demand this immediate measure necessary for both the COVID-19 response effort and to protect the masses from unemployment and poverty and that will, on the other hand, in the course of their struggle to win this demand, point working class people towards the ultimate need for the confiscation of the banks and all key sectors and their transferal into public ownership.

WE NEED A WORKERS STATE

If powerful working class struggle were able to force the capitalist government to nationalise the banks, the question then becomes posed: who would be administering this now state-run finance system? Sure, a finance system under state control would face more mass pressure to run its operations according to people’s interests than privately owned banks do. However, would you trust the anti-working class Morrison government or the desperate-to-not-scare-the-capitalists-Albanese led ALP to ensure that a state bank would actually serve the masses rather than the big end of town?

The problem is not simply the government but the bureaucracy. No matter the political stripe of who sits in ministers’ chairs and who wins elections, the fact is that the same layer of high-ranking state officials who have been allowing the finance sector corporations to fleece the public will still be the ones “regulating” them. The “regulator” of the finance sector, ASIC (Australian Securities and Investments Commission) has been so deferential to the finance industry bosses that even the limp Royal Commission criticised it for its “softly, softly approach” to illegal activity by the banks. However, ASIC is not going to fundamentally change. If you see who leads it, even now after getting a slap on the wrist from the Royal Commission, you will know why. ASIC’s leadership remains people with strong ties to the finance sector bosses and other corporate bigwigs. Thus ASIC chair, James Shipton, spent ten years as the managing director of various divisions of the Asia-Pacific office of American banking giant, Goldman Sachs. Of the six other commissioners who lead ASIC, one previously had senior roles in NAB and ANZ (and does anyone expect him to now go hard on them?!!), two had been top bosses of other finance services companies and one had been most recently CEO of the Myer Family Company.

Yet, it is not only their leaders’ previous links to the corporate bosses that tie state institutions like ASIC to the capitalist class. For one, the wealth that these ASIC heads would have acquired when they were high fliers in the banking and broader corporate world – and the ensuing investing of part of this wealth that they have no doubt made into shares and/or share-investing wealth management schemes – would make them very much identify their interests with those of the big end of town and not with working class people. Moreover, since wealthy business owners control the economy and, thus, largely determine who gets hired and at what pay, they can, without even saying a word, entice senior bureaucrats at state institutions with the prospect of future lucrative jobs at their companies should they “respect” their interests; and, in effect, threaten these state officials with being locked out of future employment prospects should these bureaucrats dare step on their toes. One only has to look at who are the directors leading the big finance sector companies and other corporations and one will see how this works. Let’s take ANZ bank as a case study. ANZ’s David Gonski, prior to being appointed chairman in 2014, had been a top official of a number of Australian state bodies. He had been head of the Future Fund which directs government investments into long-term projects. From 2010 to 2011 he also headed a government commission to look into education funding which produced the well-known Gonski Report. In the year prior to becoming ANZ chairman, Gonski had also been appointed to ASIC’s External Advisory Panel and actually continued there until last year. Consider this: say Gonski had, if he hypothetically wanted to, tried to direct Future Fund investments in a way that actually benefited working class people rather than the corporate owners, had in his Gonski Report called to slash public funding for private schools rather than agree to perpetuate it and while on ASIC’s External Advisory Panel pushed for a severe crackdown on the banks, does anyone think that ANZ’s big shareholders would have then appointed him their chairman? And wouldn’t being aware of how his future career prospects in the corporate world are affected by how he acts while heading state institutions colour his conduct when being a high-ranking Australian state bureaucrat? Actually, Gonski is not the only ANZ boss who had been on ASIC’s External Advisory Panel. One of ANZ’s top executives had previously been Vice-Chair of this ASIC body and the current chairman of Suncorp is still on that panel, all of which highlights further the links between ASIC and the finance sector bosses that they supposedly “regulate.” Meanwhile, an ANZ director had previously held the top bureaucrat position, Secretary, in both the Australian Department of Finance and the Australian Department of Health. This director, Jane Halton, is currently also one of the ten council members that lead the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the state defence think tank notorious for being the most fanatical force promoting Australia’s military build up and its war-mongering hostility to socialistic China. This also highlights the fact that some capitalists hold key positions in the state machinery even while they are still directors of corporations. Thus, one of the NAB’s directors, is also a director of Infrastructure Victoria. Moreover, the chairman of the NDIS, Helen Nugent, is also a director of insurance corporation IAG. So if disabled and ill workers are wondering why they often face intrusive interrogations from the NDIS and sometimes even cop bullying threats to cut them off the Disability Support Pension just know this, the boss of the NDIS is a director of one of the leaching insurance giants who holds over $220,000 worth of shares in that corporation (according to their last annual report) and is paid by them almost a quarter of a million dollars a year for basically attending a meeting every 16 days (on average) and reading some reports. Prior to being appointed NDIS supremo in 2017, Nugent had been up until 2014 a director of Macquarie Group for 15 years. And controversially, the NDIS has awarded Macquarie a contract to build disability housing for them while Nugent actually conducts her leadership of the NDIS in an office rented from Macquarie!

Left: One of the ANZ Bank’s super high-paid directors is Jane Halton. As well as also being a director of James Packer’s Crown Resorts, Halton is one of the ten council members that lead the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the government defence think tank notorious for being the force most fanatically promoting Australia’s military build up and its aggressive military posture. Through shared occupancy of leading positions, personal ties and the economic dominance of capitalist corporations, Australia’s capitalist class ensure that all state institutions are subordinate to their interests. Right: One of the many unarmed civilians being murdered by Australian SAS special forces troops in Afghanistan. This particular war crime took place in May 2012 in Uruzgan province. The unarmed person being executed in cold blood was a man in his mid-twenties known as Dad Mohammad, a married father of two young children.

The intertwining between the capitalist bosses and the upper echelons of the bureaucracy extends into state institutions crucial to shaping the ideological direction of society. Thus, much of the leadership of the universities is held by corporate bigwigs. The chancellor of UTS is, for example, none other than the chairman of CBA. Meanwhile the deputy chairman of the broadcaster SBS, George Savvides, is a director of IAG, while another member of the nine-member board that sets SBS’s direction, Peeyush Gupta, is a director of NAB. This is worth knowing in case anyone is tempted to believe that SBS is any more “independent” of the capitalists than the Murdoch media or the commercial TV and radio stations.

Through their economic power and wealth, the capitalists not only ensure that the upper ranks of the state bureaucracy are tied to them by thousands of threads – if they are not actually personally holding these positions themselves – they also subordinate to their interests all the other coercive bodies of the state. This includes the legal system. ASIC have not only been extremely timid when facing the banks because of their ties to the bank bosses. That is, of course, very true. However, part of the reason for ASIC’s prostration is that they are downright intimidated at the prospects of taking on the banks in the courts. Since the courts are biased towards the corporate bigwigs and since the bank bosses have enormous financial resources to hire the best, most expensive barristers and to fund expensive court proceedings and appeals, ASIC fears losing expensive court battles with the banks.

Left: Former Commonwealth Bank of Australia top executive, Annabel Spring. She had been responsible for some of the sections of CBA most responsible for charging customers fees for no service and for setting up dodgy insurance schemes with contracts so tightly worded that customers were basically ineligible to claim anything on the policies. In 2015, the then CBA wealth boss bought a Centennial Park trophy home (Centre) for nearly $10 million from one of NSW’s top judges, Antony Meagher (Right). Meagher is a judge at the Court of Appeal of the NSW Supreme Court, the highest court for civil matters in NSW. The high-paid judges, bureaucrats and other officials at the top of Australia’s state organs share much in common with the corporate bigwigs and have numerous financial, social and familial ties to them.

That is why alongside agitating for putting the finance system under state control, we need to fight for people’s supervision of the banks. We cannot trust state institutions tied to the capitalists to regulate even a state-controlled finance system. Therefore, we must demand – and indeed assert – inspection of all commercial bank transactions and big accounts by committees consisting of unionised bank employees’ representatives alongside of representatives of other unions and mass organisations. Such committees can call in financial experts as consultants to help make sense of information but the great advantage of having class-conscious finance sector employees involved in these inspections is that they themselves understand all the terminology of the finance world. These working peoples’ committees can then collate the information and highlight the key results – as well as egregious cases of fraud and manipulation by the very rich – to the public in a form easily understood by the masses. In that way the people can know to which businesses and which sectors credit is being lent and what is the proportion of housing loans going into homes for the debtors to actually live in as opposed to for the sake of housing speculation. Moreover, we will be able to finally discover who the exact owners of the finance sector corporations are. We will also be able to expose which wealthy capitalists have been hiding their true income to avoid tax and by how much. Similarly, the extent to which corporate bosses have been ripping off the public budget when acting as contractors for state projects as well as bribery of state officials by the capitalists can be exposed.

Thus, a state-controlled finance sector where working people’s committees make transparent to the masses the operations of a united state bank will enable the masses to exert enough pressure to have some control over this key pivot of a modern economy. Yet this will only be some control. For as long as the state as a whole – including its key coercive organs of the courts, the police, the prison, army, the regulators and the broader bureaucracy – remains the existing capitalist state that has been created and built up to serve the interests of the wealthy business owners then any attempt to exert workers’ control over the economy will face sabotage and obfuscation through bureaucratic means. As Leon Trotsky, leader of the Fourth International, which at the time (albeit with some mis-steps) continued the fight for the revolutionary internationalist program that guided Lenin’s Bolsheviks, emphasised in The Transitional Program, the program that the Fourth International adopted in 1938 at a time of acute capitalist crisis in the lead up to World War II:

“… the state-ization of the banks will produce these favourable results [large scale industry and transport directed by a public bank to serve the vital interests of the workers and all other toilers] only if the state power itself passes completely from the hands of the exploiters into the hands of the toilers.”

This is the goal that we must advance towards: the sweeping away of the capitalist state and the construction of a new state to serve the interests of the working class and all the other oppressed. The building of such a workers state is needed not only to ensure that any state bank truly operates for the masses but as the pre-condition necessary to enable the confiscation of all the backbone sectors of the economy and their transferral into socialist, that is public, ownership. For while the capitalist class, in a crisis, may, to save their system as a whole, nationalise some sectors and in other cases may acquiesce to some nationalisations as a concession to powerful working class struggle, they will never accept the wholesale dispossession of their ownership of the economy unless they are actually deposed from political power.

CHINA’S BANKS ARE GENUINELY UNDER PUBLIC OWNERSHIP
BECAUSE THE PRC IS A WORKERS STATE

It took the revolutionary overthrow from power of the capitalists, the agricultural landlords and the henchmen of Western imperialism in 1949 to enable China’s banks, industry, mines and agricultural land to be transferred into collective ownership by the people. The 1949 Revolution was a heroic struggle in which tens of millions of agricultural labourers, poor tenant farmers and workers directly participated. However, although this great revolution brought the toiling classes to power, because the revolutionary forces were heavily based on hard-to-unite tenant farmers (unlike the 1917 October Revolution that was based on united workers organised through elected workers-led councils) who, while suffering common exploitation by greedy landlords, nevertheless produced for themselves and competed in the markets to sell their produce, the new society had to be held together and administered from above. The ruling middle class bureaucracy, while they still had to administer the society in the interests of the victorious toilers, did so in an imperfect way and in a manner that ensured their own privileges. In the late 1970s, the bureaucratic PRC government, faced with the need to boost production and in the face of intense pressure from the surrounding capitalist world, turned to pro-market reforms. In the following years, a sizeable private sector has developed in China, far in excess of the partial concessions to a private sector that can sometimes be needed in the transition phase between capitalism and socialism. This has brought with it some of the vices of capitalist society such as inequality. Nevertheless, the socialistic public sector still thoroughly dominates the key means of production in China.

Moreover, the fact that the PRC is a socialistic state and the mostly smaller private businesses rely on state-owned giants for raw materials, transportation and energy means that even China’s private sector is sometimes constrained to partially serve broader social goals. If we compare China with capitalist countries, we find that the relationship between private bosses and the state are the very opposite of each other. In Australia, Indonesia, India, Italy or the U.S., the capitalist state and its officials suck up to the rich capitalists who are the real power. In contrast in Red China, the private business owners that do exist suck up to the workers state and are desperate to show their deference to the socialistic order. As a result, during this COVID-19 pandemic even some privately-owned businesses contributed to the relief effort. Indeed, even greedy capitalist billionaire, Jack Ma, with rumours swirling that he was forced to retire last year to try and head off being cracked down upon – as has deservedly happened to so many other high-flying capitalist exploiters in China before him – tried to win favour with authorities by making significant donations to the pandemic response.

However, the existence of a too large private sector remains a problem in China. Although the PRC was able to mobilise its state-dominated economy to very quickly and effectively build hospitals and produce urgently needed items for the pandemic response, the fact is China would have been able to respond even faster had the proportion of the economy under state ownership been even higher. And that would have saved still more lives. Moreover, the existence of a sizeable capitalist class with wealth and influence presents a mortal threat to China’s socialistic system. These capitalists are not happy that they are largely cut out of the most profitable sectors of the Chinese economy like the banks, the oil and gas companies and the other strategic sectors. They resent being pressured to sometimes sacrifice their profits for the social good. These frustrated capitalists are, thus, constantly seeking to expand their tenuous “right” to “freely” exploit labour unrestricted by any constraints. Moreover, many of these capitalists quietly harbour more ambitious aims. They are waiting for the moment, during some sort of social or economic crisis, when they can make a bid for power. They know that they will have the full backing of the capitalist powers around the world in this endeavour.

Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen the already intense hostility towards China of the U.S., Australian, British, Japanese, German and other imperialist rulers rise to still higher levels. These imperialist ruling classes have engaged in a hysterical campaign of lies to blame socialistic China for the pandemic spread. The capitalist rulers fear that their own working class masses will compare China’s effective and successful response to the virus threat with their own flawed and ineffective response and will thus draw the conclusion that the socialist system is superior and needs to be fought for in their own countries. This is, in fact, the greatest fear of the capitalist rulers. But for the very same reason that the capitalists hate the fact that the world’s most populous country is under socialistic rule – and is actually proving that socialism works – the working classes in the capitalist world should defend socialistic rule in China. For the existence of the PRC workers state – despite all its bureaucratic deformations, its concessions to capitalists and its resulting fragility – makes the struggle for working class rule in Australia and the rest of the capitalist world stronger. That is why the workers movement must oppose the Australian regime’s military build up against China and her socialistic North Korean ally, must stand against the U.S. and Australian Navy’s military’s provocations against China in the South China Sea, must oppose Australian support for anticommunist forces within China (from the far-right Falun Dafa outfit to the pro-colonial, rich kid rioters in Hong Kong) and must resist the Australian regime’s attempts to intimidate and silence pro-PRC voices within Australia – including those of pro-PRC Chinese international students. Right now we especially need to refute all the China-bashing lies being spread over the COVID-19 pandemic. We also need to explain to the masses that for all the incompleteness of China’s transition to socialism, the fact that public ownership plays the backbone role in her economy was what made the PRC so effectively able to respond to the virus threat. In doing so we will at the same time motivate the need to fight here for a system of public ownership based on working class rule, i.e. a socialist system.

However, working class people will not be won to seeing the need for socialist revolution simply through hearing explanations of its necessity. The masses learn mainly through participating in – and drawing lessons from the experience of – struggles for their immediate interests. That is why all those who understand the need for a socialist future must fight to build such campaigns. At the same time, we must work hard to ensure that these struggles for immediate gains are waged in such a manner as they teach the working class to distrust all the parties and factions of the capitalist class, convince the masses to trust only their own power, place no reliance on any institutions of the capitalist state and are based on slogans that advance the working class towards the conclusion that they will in the future need to take both the economy and state power into their own collective hands. Today that means building struggles to fight for the nationalisation of the banks and for the winning of jobs for all through forcing companies to hire (and in many cases re-hire) more workers at the expense of their profits.

THE PROGRAM OF NATIONALISATION OF THE BANKS
VS THE GREENS PARTY AGENDA

If anyone thinks that urgently needed measures like the nationalisation of the banks can be won merely through the parliamentary process, one has only to look at the agenda of the current parliamentary parties to see why not. Of all the parliamentary parties the Australian Greens have been the most critical of the current banking system. So their program deserves to be given some scrutiny. The Greens call for more regulation of the banks. As a policy principle, they say that, “Publicly-owned financial institutions should form a key component of Australia’s banking sector”, without offering any program about how that would arise. But they fail, even now during this time of public health and economic emergency, to call for the nationalisation of the banks. At most their agenda amounts to a return to the system that we had before the Hawke-Keating reforms of the 1980s and 1990s – and in some ways not even that since the Greens do not call for the reimposition of state control over bank interest rates. Yet, while the banks were slightly more constrained in their operations before the Hawke-Keating reforms, they hardly operated even then in the service of the people. They were still largely driven by the imperative to maximise profits.

A major part of The Greens agenda for turning back the clock is to split up financial planning and superannuation operations from the banks. However, the banks themselves are doing this now in the wake of bad publicity. Indeed, in good part they have already completed this. Last year Westpac sold off its financial advice arm BT Financial and CBA sold off its financial planning arm, Count Financial. The Greens hope that making the banks smaller will reduce abuses by them. However, the new broken up or sold off, but still massive, corporations will still be run for profits. Moreover, the new wealth management corporations will likely be significantly owned by the very same very rich people – yes and through those “bank nominee” fronts – as the banks are. The bank owners quite happily pursued this break up option because by separating out its wealth management arms that had a particularly bad reputation, their banking operations can be shielded from the foul publicity arising from the openly fraudulent practices of the financial planning operations.

Much of the remainder of The Greens practical program for the finance sector like calling for “effective regulatory supervision to enforce prudential regulation” is very similar to what the limp Royal Commission recommended. Overall, The Greens platform will not fundamentally change the way the financial system operates. Banks will still be run largely on the profit motive and will still have freedom to decide who they lend to and at what rates. And many working class people couldn’t care less if the banks own wealth management operations or not because they have little money to put into these funds anyway! So even though The Greens say in the abstract that the “banking and finance industry should serve the broader public interest”, their actual program will not get anyway near this. The reason that The Greens’ agenda cannot come even close to advocating what is really needed to begin to make “banking and finance industry serve the broader public interest,” that is the nationalisation of the banks, is that such an agenda can only be won through working class struggle against the capitalist class. But The Greens cannot truly promote such an agenda as their party includes and appeals to all classes – including capitalists. Owning operations in areas like renewable energy, services, online business, hospitality, tourism and the arts, the full-blown capitalist exploiters that support The Greens feel that the Greens push to favour their sectors over fossil-fuel and energy guzzling sectors would dovetail with their own business interests. Sure, these capitalists accept a more far-sighted view of the threat of climate change than coal mining bosses do. But they are still capitalists who exploit workers! To even speak of nationalisation of any sector would scare these “enlightened capitalist” exploiters as it would make them fear that their own operations could face nationalisation next. Meanwhile, playing a very prominent role in The Greens are well-heeled, upper-middle class professionals. This latter chunk of Greens supporters are, to be sure, somewhat “progressive” minded. But, just like the actual capitalists in The Greens, this does not stop them from having considerable sums put into wealth management products – who in turn invest this money in shares (including bank shares) – or into their own direct shareholdings. So, they would not be too thrilled about any measures that could radically slash the profits of banks.

This same dilemma faces The Greens more broadly – an abstract wish for less inequality and a more “people-oriented society” but no program that would deliver this. Take, for instance, the signature policy of The Greens and its new leader Adam Bandt: “A Green New Deal.” They say that the aims of this “Green New Deal” are “tackling social and economic inequality,” reducing underemployment, increasing wages, having more secure jobs, giving young people more hope of buying a house and ensuring action to beat the climate crisis. OK, but The Greens say this would be achieved through “a government-led plan of investment and action.” However, any reduction of inequality requires struggle against the exploiting class by the working class masses. Government investment in social programs and “clean jobs” requires someone to pay for such measures which requires a struggle against the capitalists to make them pay. The Greens do not even mention this crucial element of class struggle without which talk of building “a caring society” is meaningless. They want to make capitalist society fairer without standing up to capitalist power. And how could they when actual capitalists play a significant role in their own party! Without challenging capitalist power, any government spending and policies will inevitably bend to the demands of this powerful class. That is why when The Greens have actually been in office they have administered society in a way barely different to the other pro-capitalist parties. As part of a coalition with the ALP, the Greens had two ministries in the Tasmanian governments from 2010 to 2014 that cut the jobs of hundreds of nurses, closed public hospital beds, reduced funding for ambulance services, slashed funding for public housing maintenance, cut public sector jobs and reduced public sector pay increases below inflation. In his portfolio as minister for Education and Corrections in these governments, then Tasmanian Greens leader, Nick McKim, oversaw a prison system with substandard conditions for prisoners and tried to close 20 public schools before angry mass opposition forced him to back down. Meanwhile, the Australian Greens counterpart in Austria proved the commitment of this brand of politics to the anti-working class status quo by earlier this year joining in a government coalition with the right-wing, anti-union and anti-immigrant Austrian People’s Party.

Therefore, while we support action to fight for certain particular policies that Bandt has also advocated – like dental into Medicare and free education – we oppose overall The Greens and Bandt’s program of refusing any challenge to the power of the capitalists, while greening capitalism, under a “Green New Deal.” Remember how The Greens’ platform, including the Green New Deal, does not even call for the nationalisation of the banks. Unfortunately, however, much of the far-left in Australia have been cheering The Greens program. The Socialist Alliance have been the most enthusiastic. The Solidarity group are not far behind, only adding that “Adam Bandt’s Green New Deal won’t be won through electoral dead end.” The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) meanwhile ran an editorial in the February 17 issue of their paper, The Guardian, that pushed for overall (albeit qualified) support for Bandt’s Green New Deal, even while very correctly acknowledging that The Greens are a bourgeois party. This despite several contributors to their newspaper insightfully and convincingly attacking the Green New Deal agenda last year. Thus, in the 19 September 2019 issue of the CPA’s newspaper, an article titled “Socialism or perish” rightly argued that “we should be openly and loudly challenging the ideas put forward by many young climate activists and NGO groups who argue for a `Green New Deal’ or other policies that amount to the greening of capitalism.” In effect, in response to such points, the February 17 CPA editorial raises the argument that supporting the Green New Deal would be a united front with The Greens. Here they confuse agreements between communists and one or more reformist tendencies within the workers movement – which may include Laborite union leaders, “democratic socialist” groups and mass social democratic parties based on our unions (of which the ALP is a very right-wing version) – to launch particular united-front actions, or a series of actions, when common demands arise (like supporting a strike for higher wages or a protest march against right-wing welfare cuts) with ongoing support, however qualified, for the program of a bourgeois party. In the former case, building workers’ united front actions, when it is advantageous for the overall struggle to do so, will result in increased class struggle of the working class against the capitalists and an opportunity for communists to explain to the masses the need for more deep-going attacks on the power of the capitalists. However, in the latter case, a “people’s front” alliance between leftist workers parties and a bourgeois party (that is, a party like The Greens that does not even see itself as a party for workers’ particular class interests and which includes – and is thus subordinate to – members of the dominant capitalist class), the effect is to retard class struggle by promoting the notion of salvation through a supposed “progressive” wing of the exploiting class. Now it must be said that those nominally Marxist groups that promote The Greens party’s signature platform do in their own right call for class struggle against the capitalists and for policies that do begin to challenge capitalist influence, like calling for the nationalisation of the banks. However, promoting the platform of a bourgeois party like The Greens and seeking an ongoing alliance with such a party undercuts the class struggle aspects of these left groups’ own agenda, because it ties the workers that they influence to a section of the capitalists and, thus, also promotes the illusion that the masses can win concessions without struggle against the exploiting class.

THE STRUGGLES OF TODAY THAT CAN BLAZE
THE PATH TOWARDS A SOCIALIST FUTURE

There is another reason why genuine socialists should not be promoting The Greens party, in however a qualified form. For The Greens are just as much as the Liberal-Nationals, the ALP and the far-right One Nation Party part of the Cold War drive against the world’s biggest socialistic country. Indeed, Greens NSW upper house MP, David Shoebridge, has been just as fanatical in inciting hostility to the PRC workers state as the likes of hard-right Coalition politicians like Peter Dutton, Andrew Hastie, Tim Wilson and Eric Abetz. Although Shoebridge seems to be today rejecting the far-right conspiracy theories about the World Health Organisation and China, he has spent the last several years energetically promoting other far-right conspiracy theories against China, including the ridiculous claims that China is executing members of the extreme right-wing (and rabid Trump-supporting) Falun Dafa group to harvest their organs.

Left: Filthy rich developer and tech capitalist, Graeme Wood, has donated millions to the Greens including Australia’s largest single, individual political donation. The Greens embrace of such capitalist exploiters among their ranks and donors ensures that despite objecting to the inequality of the current society and despite being critical of Australia’s financial sector, the Greens recoil from any sort of class struggle opposition to the capitalist exploiting class or any call for the nationalisation of the banks. Instead, the Greens only offer a toothless strategy of liberal middle class pressure and parliamentary manoeuvres to try and ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism. At the same time, on fundamental issues, the Greens often line up with the rest of the capitalist class – including vehemently supporting the Australian rulers’ Cold War drive against socialistic China. Centre: NSW Greens upper house MP, David Shoebridge, hosting a rally supporting the extreme right-wing, pro-Donald Trump, Chinese opposition outfit, Falun Dafa in its propaganda campaign against Red China. Shoebridge has been among the most fervent supporters of this anti-communist campaign. Right: Notorious far-right Liberal Party federal MP, Craig Kelly, speaks at a similar Falun Dafa event.

The harm done by The Greens’ support for the anti-communist drive against the PRC does not only consist of the anti-Asian racist violence that it is fuelling and the blows against the Chinese workers state that it is landing. For by attacking the world’s largest socialistic state, The Greens, no matter what else they may say, are assisting the Australian ruling class to trick the masses into believing that there is no real alternative to capitalist “democracy” and that a socialistic state dominated by public ownership would be a nightmare. In other words, The Greens’ opposition to Red China makes them an enemy of the fight for socialism in this country.

That The Greens, a party that many young leftists have hopes in, and the Labour Party, the party that retains the support of most workers, have agendas that support the ruling class drive against the world’s biggest socialistic country, that fail to call for putting the banks under state control and which accept the “right” of capitalists to sack workers whenever it is most profitable to do so proves that we need to build a new workers’ party that will truly serve the interests of the exploited and oppressed. Such a party would refuse to restrict its program to what can be tolerated by the capitalists but would, instead, lay out an agenda based on what the working class and all the downtrodden actually need. Instead of feeding into the nauseating talk, that we are hearing so much of lately, that we are “all in the same boat”, the workers party that we need would be based on a clear understanding that the interests of the working class are counterposed to those of their capitalist exploiters. Thus rejecting “national unity” with the capitalists, such a party would instead fight for the closest possible alliance between the working class in Australia and the working classes of the world. In summary, the workers party that we need must be an authentic communist party like the Bolshevik party that led the Russian Revolution. We in Trotskyist Platform work hard to contribute to the building of such a party. We understand that such a party will be built in the course of laying out a perspective based on militant class struggle in the course of joining in actions that fight for the urgent needs of the masses. Today, at this time of public health emergency, massive unemployment and growing immiseration of the masses that means agitating and mobilising to demand: Put the banks and insurance companies under state control! For the complete and permanent nationalisation of the health system! For jobs for all workers through preventing companies that have been making a profit over the years from cutting their workforce and by forcing still profitable companies to increase hiring at the expense of their profits! Permanency for all casual workers! Grant the rights of citizenship to all migrants, refugees and international students! For a six-month halt to all rent payments for residential tenants! Requisition the unoccupied dwellings of people owning more than three homes and convert this immediately into public housing!

24 July 2020: Woolworths workers on a picket line as part of a 24-hour strike. Five hundred workers at Woolworths’ warehouse in Wyong, NSW took the action to demand decent pay and conversion of long-term casuals to permanency. We need militant class struggle to win permanency for casuals, to force profitable companies to increase hiring at the expense of their profits, to win the nationalisation of the banks and to fight for a massive increase in public housing.
Photo Credit: United Workers Union

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China’s Socialistic System Enables Her People to Achieve Victory Over Virus Threat

Above, 15 February 2020: COVID-19 infected patients dance at a makeshift hospital in Wuhan used to treat and quarantine less critical cases.

CHINA’S SOCIALISTIC SYSTEM ENABLES HER PEOPLE TO ACHIEVE VICTORY OVER VIRUS THREAT

6 October 2020: It has now been a whole six months since the city in China worst affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, Wuhan removed the last restrictions on outbound travel. Those restrictions had been crucial to containing the spread of the virus, which was first detected in Wuhan. For the last several months China has been buzzing again. Not only are nearly all workplaces and schools re-opened but railways stations, airports, bars, restaurants, cafes, museums, theatres, galleries, gyms, sports stadiums, tourist venues and entertainment venues have been bustling with activity. Five days ago, people in China made 97 million domestic tourist trips on just the first day of the eight day (!) public holiday that Chinese people get for their combined National Day (i.e. anniversary of the 1949 anti-capitalist revolution) and Mid-Autumn Festival holidays. Chinese people are expected to make a further 500 million domestic tourist trips during the remaining seven days of the public holiday. Other than for the countries like Sweden where governments have callously downplayed the coronavirus threat leading to huge numbers of deaths, China and her socialistic neighbour Vietnam have more than any other populous country been able to re-open their societies.

Crucially, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and Vietnam have been able to almost completely contain the virus even while carrying out this reopening. Over the last more than one month, China, despite her huge population, has not had one single locally transmitted COVID-19 case. The only new cases have been from returning Chinese citizens and visitors arriving from overseas who have been in quarantine. By contrast other countries that have tried to significantly re-open, like Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Britain, France and Spain – not to mention the catastrophic situation in the United States – have been hit with major second waves of virus spread.

China’ success in containing the virus while re-opening is due to some very careful and often expensive efforts. For example, while most schools in Australia do not monitor the temperature of their students, China’s schools check the temperature of all students as they enter school. Some schools in Beijing have even provided students with smart thermometers that can automatically alert teachers if the student has a fever. Meanwhile, a survey found that even after the pandemic has been largely suppressed, 60% of Chinese employees are still being temperature tested when they enter work each day, including all employees at larger workplaces. Around the same percentage of workers are provided with face masks by their employers. How many of us here in Australia lucky to still have a job have the security of knowing that we and all our coworkers are being temperature tested when we enter work? How many of us are being provided with face masks by our employers? Very few would be the answer to both questions! Moreover, while universal COVID-19 testing of all people working at a nursing home only occurs in Australia after there is pandemic spread disaster like the deadly one at the Anglicare-run Newmarch House in Western Sydney, in China, all workers at nursing homes, fever clinics, medical institutes, ports, borders and prisons are given mandatory tests. Furthermore, to ensure the safety of what had been the worst-hit part of China, the PRC incredibly tested nearly 10 million people in Wuhan for the virus between May 14 and June 1. This meant that alongside the one million city residents previously tested, every single person in Wuhan has been coronavirus tested at least once, except for children under six who it is not considered advisable to have tested.

However the PRC would never have even got to the stage of being able to safely re-open if she had not succeeded in suppressing the virus in the first place. Let’s remember that China achieved this feat while facing a unique problem. You see when the virus first started spreading quickly it was on the eve of the country’s seven-day Chinese New Year public holiday. This normally sees the biggest human migrations in the world, when hundreds of millions of Chinese people travel to visit family or for vacation. Such large movements of people in crowded aircraft, trains and buses would rapidly spread any infectious disease. Moreover China was facing the rampant spread of a brand new virus that no one knew of previously and no one knew how to treat. Other countries where the virus spread later – or at least where the virus was detected later (there is some strong, though at this stage not conclusive, evidence that the coronavirus was actually in Spain and the U.S. and possibly France before it was in Wuhan) – had the advantage of knowing that the deadly coronavirus was coming and how it could be detected. When the PRC took the unprecedented step in the morning of January 23 of suspending all outbound travel from Wuhan, there was not a single recorded case of the virus in Australia. It would be another eight days until Britain recorded a case. Yet, the PRC’s response was so effective, that the proportion of China’s population that has died from COVID-19 is eleven times lower than in Australia. Meanwhile, more than nine times fewer people in China have died from the pandemic than have died in Britain, despite China having a 21 times greater population!

So why has the PRC’s response been so successful. Undoubtedly, much credit must go to the dedication and courage of her nurses, doctors, sanitation workers and community workers. This includes the 42,600 nurses and doctors from other provinces of China that heroically volunteered to go to Wuhan to help treat COVID-19 patients. In late March in Wuhan, there were emotional scenes as these medical workers about to return to their home provinces after their successful efforts broke down in tears of joy as they received warm thanks from Wuhan residents. The medics were given honorary police escorts as their brigades went in buses to Wuhan airport to fly them back to their homes as huge crowds wearing face masks lined the streets of Wuhan to cheer and honor them (see for example: https://twitter.com/OcastJournal…/status/1243791022489882624).

Yet, medical workers in other countries have also shown great resolve and determination to treat COVID-19 patients. This includes staff in the likes of the U.S., Britain and Australia, where many medical workers are of Asian, African and Middle Eastern backgrounds and have had to put up with racist abuse and harassment alongside the stress of their life-saving work. So what made the PRC’s response so decisively more effective than in these other countries? An editorial in the April 18 issue of the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, explained China’s success as follows (see:
Sustaining containment of COVID-19 in China – The Lancet ):

The quick containment of COVID-19 in China is impressive and sets an encouraging example for other countries. What can be learnt from China? Aggressive public health interventions, such as early detection of cases, contact tracing, and population behavioural change, have contributed enormously to containing the epidemic.

However, what enabled China to make those crucial “public health interventions” so effectively? When the coronavirus was ravaging China in late January and early February, before it devastated the rest of the world, the Western mainstream media claimed that the virus spread in China was evidence of the serious flaws in her political system. Now that it has been proven that the PRC responded to the virus threat far more effectively than the Western countries, in order to be consistent with the initial methodology of the mainstream Western media we must ascribe that success entirely to the superiority of her political system. China has a socialistic political and economic system based on working class rule and the dominance of public ownership of her economy – despite the fact that the wavering Beijing government has allowed too much of a capitalistic private sector. And when one compares the results of the PRC’s pandemic response to that of capitalist countries, her socialistic system comes through with flying colours.

Tragically, at this time 4634 people have died from COVID-19 in China as part of the more than one million people who have been killed by the disease worldwide. Our solidarity and heartfelt condolences go out to the friends, loved ones and families of all the victims of the virus in Australia, China and the entire world. When one compares the effectiveness of socialistic China’s response to this health emergency with that of the capitalist countries with similarly large populations, we find that her response has been far more effective regardless of which type of capitalist state that you compare with the PRC. Thus the proportion of people killed by COVID-19 in socialistic China is currently 214 times lower than in Brazil, which has a hard right government, 154 times lower than in France, which has a more mainstream liberal centre-right government and 214 times lower than in social democrat-administered Spain. Notably, the percentage of China’s people killed by the coronavirus is also 202 times lower than in the world’s capitalist superpower the U.S. – where the virus is still spreading alarmingly – and 46 times lower than in the U.S.’s only powerful capitalist rival, Russia. Meanwhile, the proportion of people killed by COVID-19 in China is 60 times lower than in one of the U.S.’s strongest allies Israel, while being 101 times lower than in one of the U.S. biggest arch enemies in the capitalist world, Iran. Moreover, the percentage of Red China’s population killed by the coronavirus is 194 times lower than in Britain, which never misses a chance to proclaim its supposed “democracy,” 31 times lower than in Turkey which has an authoritarian, defacto one-party, capitalist state and 44 times lower than in Saudi Arabia which has an absolutist, monarchist dictatorship. Nominal parliamentary “democracies”, authoritarian regimes, absolutist monarchies, hard right governments, centre-right governments, social democrat-administered “welfare states,” allies of the U.S., adversaries of the U.S., it doesn’t fundamentally matter, capitalist rule in all its forms has in general failed miserably in responding to the COVID-19 threat in comparison with socialistic China.

We should add too that the other socialistic countries have also responded in a very effective way to the pandemic. Three of these countries share borders with China – Laos, North Korea and Vietnam – and thus were other than China itself the most vulnerable to the virus spread out of Wuhan (if one discounts the slower undetected spread of the virus that may well have already taken place earlier in the U.S. or Europe). Yet, the response of these socialistic societies has been so successful that to date not a single person has died from COVID-19 in Laos and North Korea. In Vietnam, 26 times fewer people have died from the virus than in Australia, despite Vietnam having nearly four times Australia’s population. The effort of socialistic Vietnam should in particular be singled out for praise as she has not only a large population of 97 million people but a very high population density, making her at higher risk to the pandemic. Yet, through an effective program of quarantine for suspected cases, a resonant government information campaign and a collectivist spirit amongst her population that ensured that they mobilised in support of public health measures, Vietnam has been to date stunningly successful in suppressing the pandemic threat (see: How has Vietnam, a developing nation in South-East Asia, done so well to combat coronavirus? – ABC News ). Other than for the four socialistic states in Asia, the only other workers state in the world right now is Cuba. The response of Cuba, which is still burdened by a U.S. economic blockade (the DPRK is weighed down even more by draconian UN economic sanctions), to the virus threat has been less successful than the other workers states. The proportion of her people who have died from COVID-19 is more than three times that of China’s. However, this is still far, far better than most capitalist countries in her region.

PUBLIC OWNERSHIP AND THE RESULTING COLLECTIVIST SPIRIT

A volunteer takes the temperature of a scooter driver in Hangzhou in early February 2020 while another volunteer records results. A massive grassroots mobilisation involving volunteers, community workers, neighbourhood collectives and Communist Party of China local activists was key to China’s success in responding to the COVID-19 threat.
Photo credit: Chinatopix
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So how did China’s socialistic system enable her to effectively respond to the coronavirus threat? One striking example is the way that the PRC’s socialistic state-owned developers, equipment manufacturers, and communication and power firms collaborated to build two urgently needed new hospitals in Wuhan in less than two weeks. This building of additional, large infectious disease hospitals enabled Wuhan to have the capacity to treat infected patients both effectively and in a way that ensured that infections would not be passed onto others. Just as importantly, state-owned firms acted to convert in rapid time large numbers of public facilities like gymnasiums and cultural halls into makeshift hospitals. This meant that although Wuhan’s hospitals were at the start overwhelmed, before long all COVID-19 patients in China could actually be treated in hospitals rather than be made to self-quarantine at home or in nursing homes, as is the case with most coronavirus infected people in Australia, Britain and the U.S. deemed to be “non-serious cases.” In this way the PRC guaranteed not only the proper treatment of infected people but, through ensuring that all infected people were both isolated and guaranteed food and essentials without having to go shopping for such goods, they ensured that the quarantine of these people was water-tight. In contrast, the shortage of available hospital places in the likes of the U.S., Britain, Italy and Australia meant that infected people ended up passing on the virus to family members, house mates and most fatally, fellow nursing home residents.

Meanwhile, China’s state-owned manufacturers – even aircraft manufacturers, car factories, oil giants and of all industries underwear manufacturers – were quickly turned into factories making masks, ventilators, personal protective gear for medics, disinfectants, non-contact thermometers and testing kits. Such a mobilisation on this scale is not possible in capitalist countries like Australia because the private manufacturers here are totally driven by profit and will only agree to switch production if they can make a quick buck out of it. There have just been a handful of manufacturers here that have switched over their production to assist the pandemic relief effort and they have mostly done so at a slow pace and with low levels of output. Similarly, if private developers in Australia had been asked to build massive brand new hospitals in ten days or to rapidly convert large public facilities into makeshift hospitals they would have demanded a massive premium for such an urgent construction and would have wasted days if not weeks haggling for a bloated price before even thinking about starting construction. In contrast, in the PRC, not only does the socialistic public sector put social needs above profit but because the smaller private enterprises are beholden to the large public sector that dominates the markets and supply chains and because private firms have a tenuous existence under a workers state, even some private companies felt compelled to join the anti-pandemic mobilisation.

As a result of this public sector-led mobilisation, China’s daily output of medical grade N95 masks increased from 130,000 in early February to over 5 million by the end of April. Even more impressively, she increased her production of medical protective suits 90 fold from the early days of the epidemic. By late April, China was producing nearly 2 million protective suits per day! This made a huge difference to her response. Although in the early days of the pandemic, many Chinese medical workers became infected and some tragically later died, once it was realised how infectious the disease was and production of personal protective equipment was ramped up rapidly within days, all of China’s nurses, doctors and sanitation workers working in infection prone settings were able to wear space suit–style head to toe protective suits. This greatly contributed to slowing the spread of the disease within hospitals and protected the lives of medics and sanitation workers alike.

A society dominated by a collectivist economy breeds a collectivist, community spirit amongst its people. So in China, during a crisis, people, by and large, have a sense of civic duty and community responsibility. That meant that during this public health crisis, the population overwhelmingly followed hygiene and social distancing measures voluntarily. Moreover there were few cases of people fighting with each other over items like toilet paper such has occurred in Australia. To be sure, given that there is also a sizeable private sector in China that operates alongside the socialistic state sector and which operates more on the capitalist mode, the dog-eat-dog mentality dominant in capitalist countries has infected Chinese society to some degree and there were a small number of cases of selfish behaviour by individuals during the outbreak. Moreover, in a country with a population 57 times that of Australia’s, one could find a few cases too of over-zealousness by local officials. And the Western media did their best to try and find such isolated cases and deviously portray them as the norm in China. So too did Australian prime minister Scott Morrison when he deceptively claimed, at a news conference, that China’s response to COVID-19 was typified by welding doors shut to quarantine people (how many actual cases of that happening in China were there – like five cases in a country with a population of 1439 million!). But for all the cases of self-centred behaviour by a small number of individuals and the very small number of cases of bureaucratic heavy-handedness by a few Chinese local government officials, the big picture reality is that China’s current victory over the virus threat is in good part due to the overall community, collectivist spirit of her people – a spirit that has been created by the dominance in the PRC of the socialist economic mode. It was this spirit that led to a massive grassroots mobilisation in China to respond to the COVID-19 threat. The amount of people that participated in the PRC’s grassroots campaign is staggering. Four million community workers were involved in the pandemic response along with nearly 9 million volunteers, 13 million Communist Party of China (CPC) volunteers and tens upon tens of millions of local residents. Their efforts made a decisive difference. For one they ensured that at a very local level, everyone was informed about the required social distancing and hygiene measures and just as importantly were motivated as to their importance through direct discussions. They also ensured that in addition to the daily and sometimes three times daily temperature testing of all workers that was taking places in all Chinese workplaces during the height of the epidemic, people were being temperature tested in their homes at least once a day. As a result those thought to possibly have COVID-19 were quickly identified, tested for the virus and quarantined.

PRC AIDS PEOPLES OF THE WORLD

6 April, Ghana: Airport workers at the Kotota International Airport in Accra, capital of Ghana, unload a plane load of pandemic response items sent by China.

Even while still battling to get on the top of the coronavirus, the PRC began sending out medical teams and pandemic response goods to other parts of the world. Already by the end of May, the PRC had sent 29 medical expert teams to 27 countries and had directed its medical teams already stationed in 56 countries to support local pandemic response efforts. Moreover, the PRC donated large amounts of surgical masks, protective suits, disinfectants, thermometers, testing kits and ventilators to more than 150 countries. This assistance was concentrated on countries in Africa, the South Pacific, Asia and the Middle East.

This approach is radically different to that of the U.S. leadership. The Trump regime’s “America First” ethos led U.S. authorities, on several occasions, to literally seize masks in foreign countries that had already been set for export to third countries. Several countries, including France, Germany and Canada, were in this way deprived of promised supplies. Here, Australian politicians and media imbibed the same nationalist outlook as Trump. They made a big retrospective song and dance about a small amount of masks and sanitiser being exported to China – or bought and sent on to China by Chinese Australians – during the height of the virus spread there and before COVID-19 had even spread widely here. This was claimed to be harming Australia’s national interests. This did not stop Australian authorities from, for their part, importing a far, far larger number of masks, protective suits and testing kits from China.

Meanwhile, even as Australia imposed a total travel ban on non-Australian citizens from China entering here from January 31 and then a general ban on all foreign nationals or non-permanent residents from entering Australia from March 20, the PRC has never imposed a general travel ban on non-citizens arriving from any country. On March 26, China did suspend the entry of tourists and business travellers. However, international students, workers and those conducting scientific and technical research and co-operation could still enter China. Thus, the contrast between the way that international students are being treated in China with the what they are copping in Australia is striking. Notable too is the fact that while international students here who have lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic, as many indeed have, are not eligible for any welfare payments, PRC authorities have been providing meals and other essentials to international students from Africa, the South Pacific and the Middle East studying in China. Moreover, throughout this entire pandemic there has not been one single case of an international student suffering a violent racist attack in China. This is a welcome contrast to the reality faced by many international students in Australia who have had to combine enduring economic insecurity and pauperisation with being hit with terrifying physical violence.

AUSTRALIAN RULERS TRY TO MASK THE
PRC’S PANDEMIC RESPONSE SUCCESS FROM AUSTRALIA’S PEOPLE

When the coronavirus was ravaging Wuhan before the PRC managed to suppress the threat, the capitalist Australian media could not report on the epidemic sweeping China enough. They wanted to present Red China as vulnerable, backward and deeply flawed. Yet when it became clear just how effectively the PRC was responding to the pandemic and in particular just how successful her response had been in comparison with the capitalist countries, reports about the current state of the pandemic in China … suddenly disappeared from our TV screens! Instead, when the media did start talking about COVID-19 in China again they only spoke about the origins of the virus which they attributed to China, something that is as yet unproven and moreover is actually not central to examining an overall response to an infectious disease, since viral outbreaks are a natural disaster that have always been impossible to contain at their immediate source. The motivation of Australia’s mainstream media is clear. They want to mask the truth about China’s pandemic response success from Australia’s population in order to ensure that this country’s masses do not acquire a positive attitude to the PRC and her socialistic system. They understand just how many grievances that the working class masses here have and they sure don’t want people here getting any ideas about supporting socialism.

One way that the big business and government-owned Australian media have sought to mask China’s virus suppression success is to find some other, capitalist, country that they can point to as a model of success. This so that people don’t focus on the elephant in the room when it comes to successful response – Red China. One country that the Western media had held up was capitalist Singapore. Yet this blew up in their faces as Singapore had a massive second-wave virus spread that was concentrated in the terribly overcrowded dormitories of that country’s brutally exploited South Asian and South-east Asian foreign guest workers. As a result, Singapore now has an infection rate even greater than that of Britain and Italy (although thankfully a lower death rate due to the relative youth of the guest worker population). The main positive model that the mainstream media focussed on was South Korea. Yet South Korea’s number of deaths per million people is already two and a half times higher than China’s and continues to climb, whereas all of China has not had a single COVID-19 death for the last nearly five months. Japan, and quite ridiculously Germany, were also pointed to as capitalist “democratic” models of success. Yet the proportion of Japan’s population that has died from COVID-19 is already four times higher than in China, while in Germany the proportion is 36 times higher than in China. So in the end, the mainstream media had to tout Australia as the model of pandemic response success. But despite this land’s great geographic advantages of being both an island and a country with a very low population density, this country was hit by a deadly second wave centred in Victoria. So the capitalist media and government have had to sheepishly pull back on that claim as well.

When the Western media have had to grudgingly acknowledge China’s pandemic response success they have tried to tarnish this by claiming that this was the result of “authoritarian” methods and “brutal lockdowns.” The reality is however very different. The centre of virus spread in China, Wuhan was to be sure put in a water-tight quarantine to reduce the virus spread to other parts of China. People in Wuhan and some other parts of Hubei Province were required to remain in their homes. However, this was achieved largely because of the voluntary co-operation of the people, their sense of civic duty and the effectiveness of grassroots information campaigns. Moreover what made the lock down effective is that neighbourhood collectives, community workers, CPC local committees and volunteers organised to ensure deliveries of food and other essentials to every single person in lock down or quarantine as well as more broadly for vulnerable people like the elderly and disabled.

Before the pandemic hit Australia, the mainstream media here tried to play up reports and videos shared on China’s social media of isolated cases of people breaking quarantine and then loudly protesting as they are being dragged back into their homes. Yet this was the experience for just a tiny percentage of people in China. The Western media however seized on this to describe China’s methods as “brutal” and evidence of an “authoritarian communist dictatorship.” They sold that line until the virus became rampant in Europe, America and Australia. Then these countries themselves naturally needed to enforce quarantining measures too. Soon quarantining measures here in Australia were enforced through repressive means involving not only the police, but quite unnecessarily, even the army. People were hit with hefty fines if they could not show cause for why they were outdoors – some for merely jogging. Six months ago, Victorian cops fined 26 people a total of $43,000 for holding a refugee rights protest allegedly because they were outdoors other than for the allowed reasons. This despite protesters being in a car cavalcade and thus posing little risk of virus spread. Meanwhile large numbers of other people have received $1,652 on-the-spot fines for breaching social distancing restrictions, fines which necessarily affect lower-income people the most. Meanwhile, several other people have actually been arrested and hit with criminal charges. In contrast the proportion of people fined or charged for breaching quarantine in China has been tiny compared to her huge population. In most cases, those few people found to be breaching quarantine and refusing to return to their homes were instead of being fined were literally escorted or – in rare cases – dragged back into their homes. Moreover, most of this enforcement was actually performed by volunteers, neighbourhood committees and grassroots activists. If in those tiny few cases where people who breached quarantine shouted and resisted as they were being pulled back into their homes, the reason that they resisted and complained so loudly is because they could: it was not the police grabbing them back into quarantine but often literally their own neighbours, community workers or grassroots activists. Where PRC authorities actually did have harsh crackdowns was against private shopkeepers and other capitalists who tried to profiteer from the crises by raising prices. Many of these people were arrested. However, from the standpoint of the masses these are completely supportable and very necessary measures.

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 the rest of China, compulsory social distancing restrictions were actually not as stringent as the ones at the height of lockdowns in Britain, Italy, Spain and other countries. Other than for the cities in Hubei, in a further 12% of China, at the height of the pandemic, people could only go outside for work or medical reasons and one person from each household could go out to get provisions every two days. However, in the remaining 84% of China – including in China’s most well-known cities Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Chongqing, Nanjing and most of Xian and Tianjin too – compulsory restrictions were actually less stringent than they were in Australia at the height of the virus spread here. To be sure schools were suspended, mass gatherings banned, entertainment venues closed and the Chinese New Year holidays greatly extended to keep non-essential workplaces shut. Certain housing communities restricted outsiders entering their compounds, while others required people entering to have their temperature taken and be registered for tracing purposes. However, people were still allowed to move outside freely as long as they wore a mask. Nevertheless, following urgings from the government, most people chose voluntarily to stay at home out of both civic duty and for their own protection.

The fact is that China’s stunningly successful response to the coronavirus came not from “authoritarian methods.” Rather, it came from the ability of her socialistic, public sector-dominated economy to rapidly build emergency hospitals and provide urgently needed pandemic relief goods, from the sense of collective responsibility in her population created by her collectivist economic system, from the enthusiastic grassroots mobilisation by the Chinese masses and from the fact that, constrained by working class state power, the PRC leadership put people’s needs first ahead of the interests of corporate profits.

That so much could be achieved by a socialistic country so squeezed by the relentless pressure of richer imperialist powers – and one which is undermined by the intrusion of capitalistic enterprises and weakened by the lack of genuine workers democracy – shows what we could achieve in a fully socialist world. At this time of public health emergency and with millions of working class people in Australia and the rest of the capitalist world having been thrown out of their livelihoods, we need to fight all the more energetically here and across the capitalist world for a society based on public ownership and working class state power.