Official death toll in Gaza genocide tops 45,000
Over 45,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel began its war of extermination in October 2023, Gaza's Health Ministry said Monday.
Andre Damon•
The Socialist Equality Party (Australia)
David North addresses book launches in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia
David North, the chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site and of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in the United States, spoke at book launches in Sydney and Melbourne over the past week. The events were part of a visit by North, who has played a leading role in the world Trotskyist movement for more than 50 years, to the SEP in Australia.
US-sponsored war of regime change devastates Syria
The pseudo-left groups backed a war in which nearly 500,000 people lost their lives, nearly half of all the conflict-related deaths worldwide over the same period.
Jean Shaoul•
Australian Labor leaders seize on Sydney graffiti to activate police-state powers targeting anti-genocide protests
Before anything was even known about the identity of the individuals who torched a car and scrawled anti-Israel graffiti in Sydney, Prime Minister Albanese declared that this was a “hate crime” directed against all Jews.
Mike Head•
Under Labor government, Australia’s Future Fund profits from genocide and war
The $230 billion government fund holds more than half a billion dollars’ worth of shares in weapons manufacturers and war-related companies, including Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest private weapons manufacturer.
Mike Head•
Oscar Grenfell•
Andre Damon•
Jordan Shilton•
Andre Damon•
Oscar Grenfell•
Capitalist breakdown, the fight against war and the tasks of the Socialist Equality Party
This resolution was adopted by the Seventh National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia), held from October 3-6.
Stop the political frame-up of Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fraudulent charge of treason brought against Syrotiuk is aimed at intimidating and suppressing growing opposition among Ukrainian workers and youth to the imperialist-backed Zelensky regime and the escalating war against Russia.
David North•
Free Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Six months after his arrest, Bogdan Syrotiuk, the courageous Ukrainian socialist arrested for opposing the war, remains in prison awaiting a drumhead trial in a legal travesty.
Johannes Stern•
Report to the SEP (US) Eighth National Congress
The campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk and the fight against war
This report introduced the discussion and vote on the resolution "Free Bogdan Syrotiuk", which was passed unanimously by the delegates of the Eighth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US).
Clara Weiss•
More statements demanding freedom for Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk from Australia and New Zealand
“We need to stand with Bogdan now, because it’s easy to imagine the alternative: if Ukraine is able to imprison socialists and ban the WSWS without protest, what’s to stop the UK, Germany or the US, from doing the same?”
Our reporters•
Our correspondents•
Our reporter•
Our correspondents•
Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee•
Our correspondents•
Contact the SEP!
Phone: (02) 8218 3222
Email: sep@sep.org.au
Facebook: SocialistEqualityPartyAustralia
Twitter: @SEP_Australia
Instagram: socialistequalityparty_au
TikTok: @SEP_Australia
PO Box 75
Kingsgrove, NSW, 1480
Drop in Australia’s official jobless rate ends hope of mortgage interest rate relief
The Reserve Bank of Australia board wants to see higher unemployment levels, and greater falls in workers’ real wages, before any move to cut its punitive cash rate of 4.35 percent.
Mike Head•
Australian police officer out on bail despite conviction for manslaughter of frail nursing home resident
The killing of Clare Nowland, a great-grandmother, led to a public outcry across Australia and internationally because it pointed to the rising levels of police violence, especially against working-class people.
Mike Head•
Media polls point to an accelerating political crisis in Australia
The fall in Labor’s primary vote over the past month, from 30 to 27 percent, represents Labor’s worst result since it barely scraped into office in May 2022.
Mike Head•
Australia’s housing crisis sees more retirees burdened with mortgage debt
The proportion of Australians aged 55 to 64 who own their homes outright fell by almost half between 2000 and 2020, from 63.9 percent to 36.1 percent.
Vicki Mylonas•
Oscar Grenfell•
Nick Beams•
Oscar Grenfell•
Mike Head•
Oscar Grenfell•
Put the SEP on the ballot! Become an electoral member of the SEP! Take up the fight against genocide, war and inequality!
This campaign is essential to ensure that the Socialist Equality Party’s name appears on the ballot papers for the next federal election, as the only party fighting for the socialist alternative to capitalist barbarism, war, inequality and dictatorship.
Build rank-and-file committees to expand the Woolworths struggle! Mobilise workers to defeat the company’s strike-breaking operation!
Large numbers of workers from throughout Woolworths, Coles and more broadly must be rapidly mobilised to defend the strike, or this important struggle will be crushed.
Socialist Equality Party (Australia)•
Australia: NSW Labor government wins injunction banning rail strike
The injunction, coming just two days after the Fair Work Commission made an unprecedented ruling to ban pickets by 1,500 striking Woolworths workers, highlights the complete intolerance of the ruling class for any form of opposition by workers to the deepening assault on their standard of living.
Martin Scott•
Australia: Reject union sellout of Woolworths strike!
Under the “revised offer,” the hated “Framework” will remain in place, with token modifications that will do nothing to protect workers from the company’s relentless demand for speed-ups.
Martin Scott•
Growing anger over Australian university job cuts but NTEU deflects blame from Labor government
University managements have announced more than 2,000 job cuts in recent weeks, as a direct result of the Labor government’s cuts to funding and international student enrolments.
Mike Head•
Health Workers Rank-and File Committee•
Jim Franklin•
Health Workers Rank-and-File Committee •
Our reporters•
Our correspondents•
This report includes videos of speeches delivered by SEP members at the October 27 meeting, explaining the Labor government’s administration of the construction union and outlining a perspective to fight it.
Australia: Build rank-and-file committees to fight Labor’s attack on construction workers and the entire working class!
The past three months have demonstrated that the fight against Labor’s administration of the CFMEU requires a rank-and-file movement independent of the ousted union leadership.
Socialist Equality Party (Australia)•
Queensland building workers protest Liberal government attack on safety, wages and conditions
The scrapping of Best Practice Industry Conditions in Queensland was enabled by the federal Labor government’s action in August, placing the construction division of the CFMEU into administration.
Martin Scott•
Australia: More than 2,000 Sydney workers protest Labor government takeover of CFMEU
While the two previous strikes were national events, this time, workers in Sydney marched alone, cut off from the majority of building workers.
Martin Scott•
Workers and young people speak out against CFMEU administration at SEP (Australia) meeting
“The government is going for the strongest section of the trade unions on purpose, for strategy. I think the goal is just straight-up austerity against the working class and this is part of it.”
Our reporters•
Our reporters•
Our reporters•
Martin Scott•
Martin Scott•
Socialist Equality Party (Australia)•
Australian think tank urges social media campaigns to target youth for military propaganda
None of these conflicts have a popular mandate. There is significant concern in ruling circles that youth are increasingly hostile to war the associated attacks on democratic rights.
Eric Ludlow•
Sydney school students condemn disciplining of Palestinian pupil for wearing keffiyeh
The disciplining of the youth, for wearing a keffiyeh, was clearly directed by the NSW Labor government.
Our reporters•
Widespread opposition to Australia’s social media ban for under 16s
The ban is not only an attempt to suppress political ferment among young people, but would impact upon the entire population.
Oscar Grenfell•
Australian government determined to slash international student numbers despite rejection of enrolment cap bill
Labor is intent on outdoing the Liberal-National Coalition opposition in making overseas students, along with immigrants and refugees, scapegoats for the intensifying cost-of-living, housing and social crisis affecting millions of working-class households.
Mike Head•
Our reporters•
Our reporters•
International Youth and Students for Social Equality (Australia)•
Eric Ludlow•
Eric Ludlow•
Beams pointed to the roots of the pseudo-left in tendencies that broke from the Trotskyist movement and rejected the revolutionary role of the working class.
Deals establish Australian neo-colonial control over Nauru, PNG security policy
As part of the aggressive US-led plans for war with China, the Australian Labor government is reviving transparent neo-colonialism in the Pacific.
Oscar Grenfell•
New Zealand and Australia to build integrated military force against China
Australia and New Zealand ministers agreed to uphold the 1951 ANZUS Treaty, which would automatically involve both countries in a US war against China.
Tom Peters•
Stop the escalating NATO war against Russia!
After US-UK bombings of Russia, the alarm must be sounded: Whether or not war has been declared, a state of war effectively exists between major nuclear-armed powers.
Alex Lantier, Johannes Stern•
US, Japanese, Australian defence ministers boost anti-China military collaboration
The deployment of Japanese troops in Darwin is one component of a far-reaching integration of the three militaries, directed against China.
Peter Symonds•
Oscar Grenfell•
Oscar Grenfell•
Peter Symonds•
Oscar Grenfell•
Oscar Grenfell•
Zionist lawsuit initiated against two anti-genocide Australian academics
This case is a major attack on basic democratic and legal rights, seeking to set a wider precedent to suppress any dissent against the escalating Israeli mass killings in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Lebanon.
Jack Turner•
Australian police step up targeting of anti-genocide protesters
The police crackdown, being coordinated at the highest levels of government and the state, marks a further step in the criminalisation of opposition to war.
Eric Ludlow•
Australian students denounce Labor foreign minister for complicity in Gaza genocide
Wong was to give a speech at the University of Tasmania on international relations and policy. Her speech was interrupted by protesters on about a dozen occasions.
Eric Ludlow•
Australian Labor governments escalate repression of pro-Palestinian protesters
Over the past week, authorities have carried out a series of attacks on protests opposing the genocide, which have the hallmarks of a nationally coordinated crackdown.
Oscar Grenfell•
Eric Ludlow•
Martin Scott•
Mike Head•
Oscar Grenfell, Eric Ludlow•
Carolyn Kennett, Mike Head•
Book launch with David North and Evan Blake: Two works, on Trotsky and the pandemic
At an event in Sydney, Australia on Thursday, May 25, World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North launched his new book Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century. He was joined by Evan Blake, a leading member of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States, who presented another new title from Mehring Books, COVID, Capitalism, and Class War: A Social and Political Chronology of the Pandemic.
Julian Assange is free, but the struggle to defend democratic rights continues
On Monday, Julian Assange walked out of the UK’s Belmarsh Prison a free man, following five years of imprisonment and nearly 15 years of persecution by a cabal of imperialist governments led by the United States which hounded him for exposing their crimes.
Statement of the World Socialist Web Site editorial board•
The Australian Labor Party’s record in the Assange case
The Australian government's involvement in the plea deal arrangements was the result of mass popular pressure. It followed years of Labor actively assisting the persecution of Assange.
Oscar Grenfell•
Australian spooks and their media mouthpieces bemoan Assange’s freedom
The complaints have a pathetic character to them, but also underscore the fact that the assault on democratic rights associated with the persecution of Assange persists and deepens.
Oscar Grenfell•
Julian Assange arrives in Australia free
In a press conference, Stella Assange hailed a global support movement for creating the conditions for Assange's freedom, while warning of an ongoing assault on press freedom that had to be fought.
Oscar Grenfell•
Oscar Grenfell•
Thomas Scripps•
Laura Tiernan•
Oscar Grenfell•
Thomas Scripps, Chris Marsden•
Australian COVID inquiry promotes “let it rip,” denounces public health measures
The report, riddled with lies and misinformation, is a crude justification for the subordination of public health and lives to the profit interests of the corporate and financial elite.
Oscar Grenfell•
The spread of H5N1 bird flu among animals and the growing possibility of a pandemic
The developing avian influenza panzootic and the growing possibility of a pandemic bring to the fore the existential questions for humanity of climate change and the destruction of public health, both of which must be stopped in order to control the growing threats.
Frank Gaglioti•
Australia: Hospital-acquired COVID infection caused more than 6,000 cases and almost 300 deaths in NSW last year
This is a direct product of the conscious and planned abolition of virtually all public health measures to prevent the spread of COVID, including the removal of mask mandates in hospitals.
John Mackay, Martin Scott•
Australian COVID-19 infections rise to highest level in more than a year
Amid an influx of patients and a surge in staff illness, authorities in some parts of the country have been forced to cancel elective surgeries and temporarily reinstitute masking in health facilities.
Martin Scott•
John Mackay•
Oscar Grenfell•
Frank Gaglioti•
Benjamin Mateus•
Bill Shaw•
Put a socialist, anti-war party on the ballot! Join the SEP (Australia) as an electoral member today!
Socialist Equality Party assistant national secretary Max Boddy calls on workers and young people in Australia to sign up as an SEP electoral member.
Apply for electoral membership of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia)
The SEP has launched an energetic campaign to register with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) as a political party. This will enable us to field candidates with the party name on the ballot paper in the next federal elections. We are currently excluded from this basic right due to anti-democratic electoral laws jointly rammed through the Australian parliament by the Labor and Liberal parties on August 26, 2021, which tripled the required membership number to 1,500. This is to block ordinary people from choosing to vote for a socialist candidate.
The working class must have a conscious political voice. Join the SEP today.
Our party fights for:
● Social equality for all!
● An immediate end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
● An end to all militarism and war.
● A scientific program to eradicate the coronavirus pandemic. No to the mass death policies of the ruling elite.
● Against nationalism and racism. For the unity of the international working class.
● Quality, free education and healthcare for all. A decent, full-time job with permanent conditions for those able to work.
● A workers’ government and socialism—democratic control of the wealth that workers produce, for human need, not corporate wealth.
There is no solution to the crisis confronting the working class except by ending the capitalist system. The slaughter being carried out in Gaza is the latest and most bloody expression of the drive by imperialism to World War III. We advance a socialist program that calls for the abolition of a society based on corporate profits, the establishment of democratically-controlled public ownership over big business, and the dissolution of the vast military-industrial complex.
Fill out this form to apply to join the SEP as an Electoral Member.
Membership is free.
Fight the bipartisan attack on democracy—join the SEP as an electoral member!
In a blatant act of political censorship, the Socialist Equality Party has been deregistered. Nevertheless, the SEP will stand candidates in the federal election, if and when it is called, and conduct the broadest possible campaign for a genuine socialist alternative.
Read more
Australia: Fight the climate change disaster, become an SEP electoral member
What is required is the struggle for socialism, based on a turn to the working class, the social force whose fundamental interests align with reconstructing society to address the climate crisis.
Mark Wilson•
Australia: Workers and youth in Melbourne explain why they support the SEP’s electoral member campaign
The SEP has received an important initial response, amid widespread hostility towards the major parties and an anti-war politicisation fuelled by outrage over the ongoing US- and Australian-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Our reporters•
VIDEO: Workers and young people sign up to put the SEP (Australia) on the ballot
“The Socialist Equality Party are the only ones presenting an alternative to capitalism, imperialism, genocide and the normalisation of mass death.”
Our reporters•
Long-time Australian Labor Party member resigns to become SEP electoral member
A retired nurse and longtime Labor Party member explains why he has quit that party to join the Socialist Equality Party as an electoral member.
Mike Head•
Our reporters•
Our reporters•
Mike Head•
Socialist Equality Party (Australia)•
Mike Head•
Defeat of Australian Labor’s Voice referendum highlights stark class divide, not racism
The Voice voting patterns demonstrate the intensifying hostility of working-class people to the entire political establishment.
Mike Head•
Indigenous Voice leaders denounce Australian voters
An open letter, issued by a privileged layer of indigenous figures who led the Voice Yes campaign, further highlights the immense class chasm shown in the referendum’s overwhelming defeat on October 14.
Mike Head•
Australian pseudo-left slanders population as racist after defeat of Voice referendum
Socialist Alternative’s analysis of the referendum is an attack on the working class, exposing this organisation as a rightward moving representative of privileged layers of the affluent upper middle-class.
Oscar Grenfell•
Australian workers oppose the Voice, call for better conditions for Aboriginal people
“The Labor government is not working class, it is an elite group of people, setting up a puppet called the Voice.”
Our reporters•
Socialist Equality Party (Australia)•
Our reporters•
Socialist Equality Party (Australia)•
Oscar Grenfell•
Max Boddy•
Resolution adopted at the Sixth Congress of the SEP (Australia)
The COVID disaster and the political crisis of Australian capitalism
“The criminal ‘let it rip’ pandemic policies of governments—invariably enforced by the labour and trade union bureaucracies—have exposed the brutality of capitalism, and its readiness to sacrifice lives for corporate profit and private wealth accumulation.”
Socialist Equality Party (Australia)•
Resolution adopted at the Sixth Congress of the SEP (Australia)
Build an international movement of the working class against imperialist war!
“The same contradictions and crisis of world capitalism are also propelling the working class into struggle, providing the basis for the building of an international anti-war movement.”
Socialist Equality Party (Australia)•
Build the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees!
A mass network of interconnected rank-and-file committees can and must serve as the foundation for the fight for the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a workers’ government based on a socialist program.
Socialist Equality Party (Australia)•
Free Julian Assange!
The ongoing persecution of Julian Assange is bound up with imperialist war, escalating online censorship and a broader turn to authoritarianism.
Socialist Equality Party (Australia)•
Historical Foundations
The program of the Socialist Equality Party is of a principled, not a conjunctural and pragmatic, character. It is based on an analysis of the crisis of world capitalism and an assimilation of the strategic revolutionary experiences of the working class and the international socialist movement.
The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party was adopted by the Founding Congress of the SEP in Sydney in 2010. It traces the historical events and strategic experiences of the working class and Marxist movement spanning more than a century.
Principles
Membership in the Socialist Equality Party is based on agreement with its Statement of Principles. The principles of the SEP incorporate the essential experiences of the revolutionary upheavals of the twentieth century and the corresponding struggle waged by Marxists for the program of world socialist revolution.
Lecture series: Why study the history of Trotskyism?
The lectures, now all available online, reviewed some of the fundamental lessons of the protracted struggle by the Trotskyist movement for socialist internationalism.
Leadership
Crisp was a founding member of the Socialist Labour League, the forerunner of the SEP, in 1972, and has played a leading role in the Trotskyist movement in Australia for more than four decades. She was elected National Secretary at the Fifth National Congress of the SEP in 2020.
Max was elected to the position of assistant national secretary at the 2020 SEP National Congress. He writes regularly for the WSWS on issues facing asylum seekers and their inhumane treatment at the hands of Australian governments. He completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Newcastle, majoring in Aboriginal Studies.
Authorised by Cheryl Crisp for the Socialist Equality Party, Suite 906, 185 Elizabeth Street, Sydney, NSW, 2000.