For weeks, there have been regular protests against mandatory vaccination in Australia. At their peak at the end of November, tens of thousands of people marched in Melbourne and Sydney, with smaller numbers around the country.
These rallies have a vocal right-wing leadership — but they have attracted people outside of the far right. At the same time, rallies for action on climate change and against Aboriginal deaths in custody in the past few weeks have been unusually small, in some cases directly cut across by the anti-mandate rallies. But this is not a sign that people are moving to the right, and there are reasons to be optimistic.
The last two years have brought a deep frustration and anger to the surface of Australian society.
Working people have made enormous sacrifices in an attempt to control the covid-19 pandemic. Half the population of Australia has been through lockdown. Melbourne has spent more than 260 days locked down, longer than anywhere else in the world, with the last one lasting almost four months. The mental health toll has been enormous.
There have been more than 2000 deaths at the time of writing. It’s estimated that 10–100,000 people will face ‘long covid’, a debilitating condition that may last their whole life.
Hospital workers have been placed under enormous pressure. There is a severe shortage of nurses. Healthcare workers have been redeployed to different roles to deal with the pandemic and the vaccine rollout. Job vacancies are common and health workers are regularly working double shifts and facing extreme stress, with some people leaving the industry as a result.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been thrown out of work, or lost hours and pay. Whole industries such as tourism, tertiary education, live music, and hospitality have been devastated. Essential workers have been repeatedly placed in harm’s way, with outbreaks in aged care and construction among others. Retail and hospitality workers are now facing the brunt of abuse from customers who are unhappy with covid restrictions.
Polarisation
On top of this, there has been a deep polarisation over the issue of mandatory vaccination. About one in ten people in Australia say they don’t intend to take the vaccine. Many have lost work, being fired or quitting as a result of vaccine mandates. Many of these people are not anti-vaxxers, but are hesitant about the covid vaccines specifically.
Part of this hesitancy comes from deliberate misinformation, spread by a small number of people. In early 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that 12 accounts were responsible for 65% of false claims about vaccines, in a sample of 812,000 social media posts.
But these claims wouldn’t have the same weight if it wasn’t for the enormous failures and questionable motives in the government’s response to the pandemic. In the last year, we’ve seen constant delays and confusion over vaccines, caused by capitalist governments and the big pharmaceutical companies selling to them.
The capitalist approach to vaccines
The pharmaceutical industry develops treatments for profit, not for the public good. Vaccine supplies are controlled by a handful of large private companies. They have played countries off against each other to maximise the return for selling their product. This has resulted in a situation where vast swathes of the neocolonial world have no access to vaccines. Millions of people have been left without any protection, and new variants of the virus have appeared as a result.
In July 2020, Pfizer offered the Australian government ‘priority access’ to its vaccine, and noted that “the vaccine development landscape is moving swiftly, including through engagements with other nations”. The Morrison government claims to have turned down this early offer based on ’medical advice’, but commentators have noted that the medical advice was not available at the time, and that most likely the government had ‘commercial considerations’ in mind.
Instead, the government initially purchased only 10 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, in November 2020, but staked more on the AstraZeneca vaccine. This option was cheaper and could be manufactured by CSL in Melbourne (ensuring profits in the hands of Australian capitalists). The slow approval process, and the finding that the AstraZeneca vaccine was linked to rare blood clots, created a number of delays and reversals of policy throughout 2021.
The spread of the virus
Bill Bowtell of the University of New South Wales has said that, with more investment in the Pfizer vaccine, “We could have had 40 million doses by the start of January (2021) and the same coverage rates of adults as seen in US, UK and Israel.”
Between October 2020 and July 2021, daily new Covid cases were negligible, and there were months without any deaths. This was despite the appearance of the more-infectious Delta variant in Melbourne during May.
That changed with a new outbreak in Sydney, which grew out of control due to a slow response by the NSW government, and spread to Melbourne and Canberra. More than half of the population of Australia was placed under a strict lockdown regime during this third wave of infections.
The most heavily affected areas have been western Melbourne and western Sydney. These are areas with a large number of migrants and essential workers — people more likely to face poor safety standards at work, and to have low job security and low incomes.
The virus has spread through private security guards working in hotel quarantine, aged care facilities, abattoirs, construction workers and among truck drivers. Capitalism played the leading role in ensuring that outbreaks would still happen under lockdown.
Now that the majority of people are vaccinated, restrictions are being progressively lifted. But there are reports that the Omicron variant can spread quickly among vaccinated people, showing that vaccination is not a magic bullet to end the pandemic.
95% of the current covid hospitalisations are among the unvaccinated. The virus is circulating more freely now that most restrictions have ended. Traffic in Melbourne and Sydney is less than 50% of pre-pandemic levels, as many people still work from home and avoid public places. Unvaccinated people are effectively still under lockdown, barred from bars and restaurants and from working in certain industries.
Distrust in capitalist institutions
All of this is happening at a time when trust in establishment institutions is lower than ever. Among working-class people, neoliberal ideas such as privatisation, ‘free trade’, ‘economic rationalism’ and austerity are no longer as accepted as they were in the decades before the 2008 global financial crisis.
Casual and insecure work had grown to 40% of all work even before the pandemic. Wage rises failed to keep up with inflation. Housing was increasingly unaffordable. Unemployment and underemployment routinely outstripped job vacancies, and the welfare system has been run in a deliberately punitive way, leading to growing poverty.
The major political parties have seen declines both in membership and in their primary votes, while voters turn to independents and minor parties to ‘punish’ them. The banking industry has been embroiled in scandal. Trust in journalism has declined — the mainstream media does not reflect the reality of most people’s lives. Political commentary is driven by the interests of big business.
The distrust in capitalist institutions extends to science and medicine. Conspiracy theories about Covid-19 make sense to some people in a world where healthcare is dominated by profit. Scientists and doctors are seen as connected to the establishment, and the establishment is not trustworthy.
The distrust in science comes from the way the ruling class uses science for the sake of profit. But science has a real material basis, which often puts scientists in opposition to the ruling class. We have seen this clearly on the issue of climate change, but it has also been obvious during the pandemic, with various governments covering up their death tolls, attempts to suppress discussion of the virus in China, and lies being repeated over and over by the right-wing to avoid lockdowns that would affect profits.
The virus is not in the interests of the ruling class. Epidemics like Covid-19, as well as SARS, MERS, Ebola, and the Hendra virus before it, are rooted in the behaviour of capitalist agribusiness. As land is cleared and animals are farmed more intensively, humans are pushed more and more into contact with novel viruses.
Capitalism is responsible for the origins of the virus, and also for the fact that it has spread to become a global disaster. But this is not the result of a deliberate conspiracy. It is the result of a dysfunctional system that puts profits above both human lives and the natural world.
Most people support a society-wide response
The overwhelming majority in Australia do not agree with conspiracy theorists or with anti-vaxxers. Currently 19 million people are fully vaccinated, in a population of 25 million.
Repeated surveys, such as Guardian Essential polls, Roy Morgan polls, and the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute’s 2021 ‘Mapping Social Cohesion’ Report, have found as much as 60–70% of respondents support lockdown measures, mandatory vaccination, mandatory mask-wearing in public places and other measures. The numbers are strikingly high in Victoria, which has seen the longest lockdowns in the world.
People see the need for a whole-of-society response to the pandemic. In Melbourne in particular, working-class people have suffered enormously to prevent the disease from spreading and overwhelming the healthcare system. Hospital staff have been pushed to their limit.
People want to live their lives without fear, and to protect themselves and the people around them. The anti-mandate movement is seen as a threat to that.
On top of this, there have been assaults on retail and healthcare workers. Death threats have been left on the windshields of hospital staff. One covid-testing worker was deliberately run over with a car and had to be hospitalised. A Dymocks employee in the Melbourne CBD was pushed down an escalator by a customer when the employee asked for his vaccination status.
However, we shouldn’t overstate the influence of this movement. This movement is not the reason for the government seeking the cheapest vaccine options. They are not the reason for the slow and confusing vaccine rollout, or for essential workers being forced to face dangerous situations or risk losing pay and job security. They are not the reason for the botched hotel quarantine scheme, for decades of underfunding in healthcare, or for inadequate health and safety standards in workplaces. All these things are the result of capitalism.
The anti-mandate movement
A small minority of committed anti-vax and far-right figures have been driving the regular anti-mandate protests. A number of far-right livestreamers have risen within the anti-mandate movement. In Melbourne, this has included figures like Avi Yemini and Andrew Nolch, the misogynist ‘men’s rights activist’ famous for vandalising Eurydice Dixon’s grave.
Harrison McClean is one of the organisers of the Melbourne rallies. In Telegram groups, McClean has talked to neo-Nazis about how to downplay their anti-semitic views in order to appeal to larger numbers of people. He has been quoted telling others on the far right to use anti-vax ideas as an entry point for people, before gradually exposing them to more extreme racist conspiracy theories.
There is a small industry of right-wing politicians that have attached themselves to the movement. They hope to replicate Donald Trump’s successes in Australia. Pauline Hanson now suddenly opposes vaccines. MP Craig Kelly tries to frame himself as representing ordinary people against the political establishment, despite being in government for 8 years as a member of the Liberal Party. He is now part of the United Australia Party, which represents billionaire mining interests, and could not be further from representing workers.
However, the majority of people who are vaccine hesitant are not represented by the far right. Many do not even describe themselves as anti-vaxxers — their problem is specifically with the Covid-19 vaccines. Most don’t attend the protests — the largest protests in Melbourne reached up to 100,000 people, but there are far more vaccine-hesitant people than that.
One construction worker told journalist Jewel Topsfield that he had gotten other vaccines, but refused this one because he thinks the mandates are “blackmail”. He was quoted saying, “Nine out of 10 conversations will start with ‘You’re a f—ing idiot’ … That segregation has done nothing but encourage my stance.” (Sydney Morning Herald 21/11/2021). The same worker had been listening to far-right livestreamers for his information, saying “I understand that they are as likely to have an agenda as anyone else, but I’m open to different ideas and different opinions.”
The far-right are a real danger, but it says something that they need to actively hide their beliefs from most vaccine-hesitant people. They aren’t appealing to people on the basis of their real ideas, but on lies and conspiracy theories. Their tactic is to rally disaffected people around the issue of mandatory vaccinations. They are only able to do this because of the absence of a credible pole of attraction on the left.
A lack of leadership on the left
This is most clearly shown by the attack on the CFMEU offices in Melbourne on September 20th. CFMEU leader John Setka claimed that the anti-union far right were the main reason for the protests on that day, but there were also many normal workers there, both union and non-union.
The major unions have not taken a leading role in addressing the pandemic. They have failed to put forward an independent working-class position. Rather than politically convincing workers that vaccination is an issue of workplace safety, the Australian Council of Trade Unions has essentially deferred to the government on issues such as mandatory vaccination. They say they oppose it, while simultaneously saying vaccination is important and workers should comply with government directives, so their position comes across as confused.
With a lack of working-class leadership to give a different class position to the capitalists, the far-right has an opportunity to tap into people’s frustration.
The CFMEU has a historical reputation as a militant, left-leaning union. However, CFMEU organisers have commented anonymously to journalists that the right-wing has been influential in the union for some time. There are also parts of the industry, such as residential construction, that the union has failed to organise in recent years. Its influence and reputation among some workers is in question.
One survey showed as much as 30% of construction workers agreeing with anti-vax ideas. There is clearly a need for a union-led campaign to win people over on vaccination, based on the right to come home safe from work.
Some efforts have been made by the CFMEU, such as winning on-site vaccination for parts of the industry. The ACTU has also funded an advertising campaign, but this is not comparable to mobilising shop stewards for one-on-one conversations, and pushing the need for safety on a site-by-site basis.
Union power
The union movement should be making decisions on safety at worksites, not the government. Unionised workers have the power to implement lockdowns on their own terms, shutting down or taking over workplaces that don’t follow safety standards. For most workplaces this does mean requiring high vaccination rates.
But shaming or punishing people who are hesitant about the vaccines does not work. That approach only polarises things further. The issue requires patient explanation, addressing people’s individual concerns along the way.
One Facebook group for unvaccinated jobseekers has over 20,000 members. Often they can only find odd jobs like mowing people’s lawns. The failure of the left to address this desperate situation is pushing ordinary workers into the arms of the anti-vax movement and the far right.
Instead of being sacked, unvaccinated workers should be given the option of roles that place them away from situations where the virus may be spreading, without loss of pay. Even just a fraction of the profits of big business would easily pay for them to keep their jobs while temporarily standing down from normal roles.
The worker’s movement urgently needs to be campaigning for a living wage for all, regardless of whether they are in work or not, and regardless of the reason they may be unemployed.
The blame for the recent strengthening of the anti-vax movement doesn’t belong to disenfranchised workers. The blame belongs to the willingness of capitalism to throw people on the trash heap just for not trusting a broken system.
The Andrews Labor government
While a minority have been driven into the arms of the far-right, a larger number of people support the actions of the Labor government in Victoria. While the federal government dragged its feet and opposed almost every attempt to control the virus, in Victoria harsh lockdowns were swiftly implemented.
This has boosted the popularity of state premier Daniel Andrews among parts of the left, but Andrews is still a representative of the capitalist class. His conflict with the federal government represents a division in the ruling class. While parts of the ruling class want minimal disruptions to business as usual, others see a greater danger in letting the virus spread.
Capitalist politicians like Andrews are aware of the deepening distrust in their system. They are also aware that places overseas that have not seen lockdowns have seen disastrous results. They may not prioritise human lives, but they can see the economic damage caused by people becoming seriously ill, or staying away from public places to avoid the virus on their own initiative. Their goal is to avoid lockdowns entirely by pushing vaccination, but the Omicron variant may already be undermining that plan.
People want to be able to stay home from work without any loss of income or job security, to prevent the spread of the virus. But lockdowns have focused more on over-policing of individual people’s lives than on preventing workplace transmission.
Restrictions like the 9pm curfew and the outdoor alcohol bans introduced in Melbourne were not backed up with science. In August, Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton justified the 9pm curfew by saying that it would drive home the seriousness to people, while Andrews commented that the curfew came after police asked for “the clearest, simplest set of rules.”
They put the emphasis on individual people’s behaviour. But at the same time they did this, the virus was spreading through unsafe workplaces. The main thing undermining lockdowns was not individual behaviour, it was capitalism.
Increased police and government powers
New police powers have been introduced during the pandemic, and police repression has been focused on poorer migrant neighbourhoods. In July last year, people in Flemington and North Melbourne could leave the house for work, school, caregiving, daily exercise, or to get groceries. But in nine public housing towers in these suburbs, residents had to stay inside their units for days with no possibility of leaving.
3,000 people were kept under prison-like conditions by a force of 500 police. These estates are home to African and Middle Eastern communities who have a history of community opposition to racist policing. They found themselves confined to their homes by a police force that has spent years terrorizing young black men in their communities. Only a few years before, the same police let the far-right speaker Milo Yiannopolous address a racist crowd directly across the road from the estates.
In western Sydney, police carried out a ‘crackdown’ targeting poorer postcodes with large migrant populations, where residents have repeatedly raised complaints about racist policing. Helicopters flew overhead announcing lockdown restrictions. Footage came out of police chasing a man into his backyard to charge him with not wearing a face mask. In both Melbourne and Sydney, the military have been deployed onto the streets.
Anti-lockdown protests were met by police with rubber bullets and mass arrests. Most people were frustrated by the growth in anti-lockdown and anti-vax ideas, and this led to some support for the police crackdowns. But these tactics are an indication of what the police would like to use against environmental, anti-racist and women’s rights protests. Already, in October 2019, we saw rising police violence against climate change protesters at the IMARC conference in Melbourne.
Despite the generally high support for the lockdown measures, there is a feeling that people may not tolerate another one. The mood of many people is that we have ‘done our part.’ Even with the use of new emergency powers, the Victorian lockdown was only successful because people complied with it. It was ordinary working-class people that made lockdowns work, not the government’s brutal over-policing.
An independent, working-class position
Workers have been ahead of the ruling class from the beginning of the pandemic. In March 2020, while state and federal governments argued over whether or not to shut down schools, school attendance dropped by 50% in Victoria and 25% in NSW from parents pulling their children out.
People were discussing lockdown measures long before they came into effect. But these discussions were not happening in organised decision-making bodies, they were happening on social media and in private conversations. Decision-making was confined to the politicians that manage capitalism on behalf of the ruling class.
Measures were introduced in a careless way. Restrictions on movement forced people in remote communities to choose between risking arrest and going without essential groceries. And when panic-buying broke out, it was left up to individual supermarkets to ration goods. They responded with price-gouging and haphazard rationing that left many unable to find the basics.
The needs of ordinary people were not taken into account, because ordinary people did not have real control over how to deal with these issues. If working people had their own democratic committees through which to make policy, the pandemic would have unfolded very differently.
That would be the start of a socialist pandemic response. We need workers’ organisation in and out of workplaces, in neighbourhoods and communities. We need to radically reform healthcare and reverse the long-term trend of underfunding, and to take hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and all big business out of private hands. We need to organise on a global basis, to bring an end to the vaccine nationalism that has left neo-colonial countries with barely any access to vaccines.
The wealth of society can be harnessed to ensure nobody goes without a living wage. Democratic, open decision-making would give people a reason to trust the collective measures we take, because they would be involved in them. This is a response that would strengthen the connections between people, rather than leaving us isolated and afraid.
The working class is the key to change
People see the need for a society-wide response to the pandemic. The capitalist state and businesses seem to be the ones in a position to implement that. But these forces are unable to handle the pandemic, are responsible for it, and are only interested in keeping profits flowing. The alternative of workers’ power hasn’t been clearly demonstrated to people.
Meanwhile, the scale of the pandemic and its impacts are difficult to deal with. Lockdowns have taken a toll on people’s mental health, and many hospital workers are at breaking point. The size of the recent right-wing rallies is shocking. Death threats against hospital staff and violent assaults of retail workers are horrifying.
Nobody should blame themselves for being demoralised and confused by the last two years. Some people are drawn into conspiracy theories as a result. Others find themselves cheering on the state, and blaming the minority of anti-vaxxers for the failures of capitalism.
This response seems more straightforward, on the surface, than taking on capitalism. But we need to reject the idea that working-class people deserve the blame for what has happened.
During the pandemic, we have seen groups of workers repeatedly take action. In July 2020, members of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (RAFFWU) at JB Hi-Fi launched a campaign against sexual harassment at work, alongside campaigning to recognise the electronics retailer as non-essential work so that workers could stay home during lockdowns. RAFFWU members have also been campaigning for bosses to pay for increased security in response to attacks on retail workers in Melbourne and Sydney.
In September, farm workers at Coolibah Herbs in Victoria won paid vaccination leave. Around the same time, United Workers Union members at Scott’s Refrigerated Logistics walked off the job after raising concerns that Scott’s was in breach of its Covid Safe plan. They did this in direct response to the virus beginning to spread among the workforce.
People have seen objectively that some of the most exploitative and low-paid jobs are actually the most essential to day-to-day life. It is clear that it’s the working class that makes anything in society move at all. Nobody was remotely concerned that the rich wouldn’t be able to come into work during lockdowns. But the rich were concerned that their workers wouldn’t be there.
Workers already make society run. With organisation and a mass movement of the working class, workers have the power to change society. We don’t need the ruling class to run society over our heads — we can do it ourselves, democratically, and build a socialist world.
The future
Working people are the most progressive force in society. In May of 2021, thousands marched against the renewed war of the Israeli government against Palestinian civilians. Thousands also turned out for the rights of refugees in June, as the federal government continued to deny asylum to the Murugappan family, whose children have spent most of their lives in detention.
Just months earlier, over 100,000 people marched against victim-blaming and rape culture in the federal Parliament. In June 2020, during the second wave and while Melbourne was under strict lockdown restrictions, similar numbers marched under the Black Lives Matter banner. There was no spread of the virus at these events. In the last few years, tens of thousands across the country have regularly marched in the Invasion Day rallies on January 26th.
During the Black Summer bushfires, protests were held in every major city and a number of regional centres around Australia. More than 100,000 people turned out, protesting the government’s woeful bushfire response and its failure to take action on climate change. Immediately before this, in September 2019, Australian students joined in the global Student Strike for Climate.
Most of these protests had conscious connections to international movements. All of them show the forward-looking nature of the young, diverse, multi-racial working class, and the potential it has to change the world.
The pandemic is a disaster caused by capitalism, and capitalism is the main barrier to a solution. We need to build a movement of the working class based on solidarity and socialism. This movement needs to set, as its goal, the socialist transformation of society. This is the project that ISA is committed to around the world. We stand for a socialist alternative to capitalist alienation, and a society democratically run by the people.
