STATEMENT OF THE WORKERS LEAGUE

19-04-2022: The Australian Federal Election on May 21 comes at a historical turning point. Entering three years of Covid hysteria, the election will be nothing less than a referendum on freedom. Since March 2020, the ruling class – through numerous agents – transformed Australia into a laboratory experiment in pitiless brutality. Without even a nominal debate, Australian politicians imposed some of the most appalling lockdowns, border closures, travel restrictions, facemask and vaccine mandates on the face of the planet. Whether or not the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its claimed variants exist, and whether or not Covid-19 is a distinct illness rather than a standard cold or flu, there was never a “pandemic”. Thus there is zero scientific or medical basis for “extraordinary measures” – let alone the shutdown of the economy, the termination of employment for hundreds of thousands of workers, the removal of free speech, the abolition of the right to protest and the annihilation of civil rights.

Untenable vaccine mandates

For working people, by far the most pernicious dictate issued under the guise of Covid are the vaccine mandates which require employees to take at least two shots of an experimental injection – or face the sack. There is plain evidence that all Covid shots are extremely dangerous and could easily result in permanent injury or imminent death. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) website admits that over 800 deaths and over 110 000 adverse reactions have followed in the weeks following Covid injections, but these are likely to be a drop in the ocean. Almost everyone now knows someone who has passed away or has experienced a horrific adverse reaction – such as heart inflammation – after either voluntarily taking Covid injections, or reluctantly doing so due to immense pressure. The overwhelming majority of those who have taken Covid shots would barely have done so if there was no chance that you could lose your job, or be locked out from cafes, restaurants, venues, concerts, sporting events etc., or be turned away from a hospital or doctors’ surgery.

Some of these measures may have been temporarily lifted to take account of the approaching election – for now. Yet the most determined elements of the freedom movement – the largest and most sustained in Australia’s political history – are well aware that lockdowns, vaccine mandates and facemasks could easily be put back in place after the election. Indeed, vaccine mandates still remain in some industries in both the public and private sectors, as well as facemask mandates and other nonsensical “rules”. Given that is widely known that the vaccines do not prevent transmission of “Covid”, the vaccine mandates make no sense other than to create a system of apartheid. For workers, there is no more important right than the right to earn a living, or the right to exist.

Vaccine mandates – where workers are given the choice of taking a vaccine which risks death or being terminated – are the largest attack on the working class in history. They are also part of a diabolical plan to eliminate sections of the population to prevent a mass popular uprising. Many cannot conceive this as a genocide, yet it is taking place. To be sure, there are many other urgent and pressing issues which should be being debated in the context of an election. Unemployment, poverty, homelessness, privatisation of government services, lack of funding for healthcare and education etc., are rampant and getting worse. After some of the worst floods in memory, climate change and all aspects of environmental destruction demands immediateattention. The imperialist war against Russia (via Ukraine), and war moves against China, could escalate into a catastrophic nuclear confrontation.

 Cast a critical vote for freedom

Yet even these crucial issues cannot be addressed while a system of dystopian “medical” fascism hangs over society. The ruling class makes tactical moves to restore some elements of liberal democracy, so that many falsely believe that things are “going back to normal”. Yet this is an illusion – Covid repression, or whatever the next “pandemic” is, can be wheeled back out at any time. This is why it is in the vital interests of working people to cast a critical vote for the freedom parties on May 21, even if other positions in their platform are ideologically anti-socialist. The freedom parties, which may identify themselves as “conservative” and “right-wing”, are nonetheless temporary allies of the working class on the overarching issue of our time – the Covid civil war. The freedom parties may well betray working people after the election and may abandon the freedom movement. However, at this point, and despite themselves, the freedom parties are in combat with capitalism.

Unquestionably, leading the freedom parties is the United Australia Party (UAP). The UAP is explicitly anti-lockdown and have pledged to reinstate all workers who have lost their jobs through vaccine mandates. It is primarily for this reason that the Workers League advocates a critical vote for the UAP. Under Australia’s idiosyncratic preferential voting system, for votes to be valid, voters must number each candidate in order. That being the case, we advise directing first preferences to the freedom parties in this order: 1. UAP 2. Informed Medical Options Party (IMOP) 3. Great Australian Party (GAP) 4. Katters Australia Party (KAP) 5. Liberal Democrats (LDP) 6. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (PHON), 7. Australian Federation Party (AFP) and 8. Australian Values Party (AVP). After the freedom parties, we advise listing parties who remain virtually silent on Covid, as if to abstain. Some examples are the Citizens Party and the Fusion Party.

We strongly advise then marking the pro-lockdown and pro-vaccine mandate parties LAST. These parties have acted in the most treacherous and anti-working class manner possible by enacting Covid repression against innocent people from the benches of parliament or have effectively formed auxiliary units of the police and the armed forces. From parliament, these parties are the Australian Labor Party (ALP), the Liberal Party (LPA – which is the LNP in some states, together with the National Party of Australia), and the Greens. From outside parliament, but by no means any less perfidious, are parties such as: The New Liberals (TNL), Australian Progressives (AP), the Animal Justice Party (AJP), Australian Democrats (AD), the Reason Party, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), Victorian Socialists (VS) and the Socialist Alliance (SA). We advise listing these government agents last, with the ALP very last.

We recommend only a critical vote for the freedom parties as we sharply disagree with their nationalism, which offers no way forward. Moreover, we understand that an election cannot remove Covid repression, as that is bound up with the manifest crisis of the capitalist mode of production and the consequent political impasse of Western imperialism. What is required is the construction of genuine Marxist vanguard parties which can win advanced sections of the freedom movement to the perspective of revolution, rather than relying on the old parliaments. Opposed to the dictatorship of finance capital must be the iron rule of the working class, where the strategic means of production are publicly owned and democratically administered in the interests of common humanity.  

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Photo credit: http://www.unitedaustraliaparty.org.au