VANGUARD - Expressing the viewpoint of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)
For National Independence and Socialism • www.cpaml.org
SA nurses and midwives on strike October 2025
The Second Women’s Conference of the International Coordination of Revolutionary Parties and Organisations (ICOR) will be held this month in Kathmandu, Nepal. The following is a report for the Conference from our Party – eds.
Contribution to ICOR’s women’s conference by CPA (M-L)
Louisa L.
Like all comrades worldwide, our women comrades are deeply involved in struggle.
Ruling class attacks intensify daily. US imperialism, the greatest driver of war and aggression in the world, holds state power here. 50 years ago on November 11, using the British colonial relic of the Governor General, Australia’s elected government was overthrown in a bloodless CIA coup. It sent a silent message to all incoming governments, to adhere to US domination of Australia across the board. Of course, that has always been met with resistance by our peoples.
US imperialism dominates the commanding heights of our economy and dominates its daily culture. Australian governments organise and often subsidise unfettered corporate plunder of the land and water and widening suppression of the people. Australia’s land is dotted with US military bases, and our armed forces are now a wing of the US war machine.
The deepening economic crisis of US capitalism means subservient Australia governments ensure Australian taxpayers fund economic and military development of the US and its major allies like Japan through unjust and unequal treaties and arrangements, like AUKUS and the Quad. Our leaders portray our actual situation as US imperialism’s quarry for resources below cost price, as a victory for Australia. Labor politicians remember what happened 50 years ago and ensure it will not happen to them.
The First Peoples of this continent and its islands pay the heaviest price for the wealth of their lands. Their children are the most incarcerated on earth. On every level, health, education, life expectancy, poverty, suicide, incarceration, child removals, First Peoples are made to suffer by deliberate policy which demonises children as out of control and disempowers Elders and all those who have not been bought off. It undermines what evidence has again and again showed are the policies that improve their lives. Despite this, and despite a 25- year program by the Business Council of Australia (set up as a “union” for the biggest, overwhelmingly foreign controlled corporations operating here) to systematically divide and conquer First Peoples in order to get access to their lands and waters, First Peoples – especially women – have continued to organise and struggle.
The reality of women’s lives is affected by deepening economic crisis. Huge cost of living increases, especially necessities of housing, health, education, transport fall on all people, but disproportionately on women, who still provide most caring duties and who earn much lower lifetime wages. Older women are the fastest growing group of homeless. Single parents, mostly women, fear children will be removed if they become homeless. Instead of being assisted, their lives are destroyed.
Across Australia, house prices and especially rents have increased astronomically. Sydney has the second most costly housing in the world, while the real estate, development and construction industries make record profits. All rules and restrictions that hinder the industry (or mining and resource industries) in any way are targeted for removal.
While profits have been at record levels for decades, intensity and hours of work have increased dramatically, wages and conditions have deteriorated. Childcare fees are sky high in an increasingly unsafe privatised system. Australia has some of the most unequal education and health care systems in the developed world, as government funded private schools, universities, and for-profit medical centres and hospitals flourish, while state schools enrol all those who private schools reject on the class or income base of the parents, (without using such “nasty”, truthful words) as too poor, too disabled or not ‘talented’ enough.
Just as the private education cherry picks the best “crop” of students, the private hospital system is designed to cherry pick those with the most profitable operations and procedures. Australia has the highest proportion of hip and knee replacements in the world, quick, straightforward, churned out every day, day after day. Private hospitals don’t want sick people.
Worst is mental health care. A mass resignation of public hospital psychiatric doctors this year in NSW – many of them women – occurred not primarily because of shocking wages and conditions. The main concern was that there are almost no public rehabilitation hospitals. Critically ill patients, threatening self-harm or harm to others have waited 70 hours in waiting rooms, and left without being seen. Many are homeless. Many are in jails, which are otherwise mostly full of First Peoples and those the education system has failed.
Yet education and health care workers – mainly women – are the biggest unions in the country. Unions are generally compliant. Independent organisation is key here, not usually as secret factions, but as open and active in struggle. This section of the working class flares up in struggle, with financial increases won quickly eaten away in price rises. Most new teachers leave the public system within five years, predominantly because of shocking workload, much of it compliance form-filling, totally at odds with educational needs. Corporate run mass testing of students has systematically brought narrowed curriculum, taking the joy from teaching and learning.
In the face of deepening crisis and class divisions, ruling class attempts to divide people by race, immigration status, age, sex, sexual orientation, where they live (especially city versus country, inner suburbs against outer suburbs, city versus country, political and religious beliefs, etc, etc abound. Alongside this, democratic rights are legislated away, police powers reinforced, jails expanded.
Individual rather than collective causes and blames are emphasised, or governments rather than those they rule for are blamed. While mass struggle brought increased action against domestic violence, and coercive control which is the cause of most homicides of women by men is now acted against, analysis of the brutal reality that underpins capitalism is largely hidden. Bad men are blamed in shockingly regular news items of yet another murdered woman. Though contested, it too often remains an individual not collective response.
In the face of all this, we are a very small, but active and growing party. Women are in key leadership roles, and often have relatively high public profiles among the ‘left’. More men are drawn to join than women, but as struggle intensifies women are also joining. The more we build intermediate organisations, between ourselves and the masses, the more we are able to take initiative in building and leading united front organisations, the stronger we will become.
Because of the genocide in Palestine, US imperialism and Zionism are more widely exposed than ever. Women have been front and centre in this struggle. The Australian Education Union, especially in NSW, has been the most forthright in supporting Palestine, and supporting staff targeted for wearing Palestinian insignia.
Australia spends hundreds of billions on war and war preparations. This glaring contradiction with unmet needs is a latent strength for those struggling for change.
Our greatest strength as a party, and as women comrades, are our mass connections, built through decades of struggle. People learn from their own experience. Right now, many are learning pessimism and powerlessness, because despite massive worldwide struggle, Palestine is off the front pages, despite ongoing land theft and genocide. But alongside that, the strength of protests around the country like the March for Humanity across the Sydney Harbour Bridge is still fresh.
How can we convince women, and women workers particularly? We start from where we are strong, our mass connections, and organise from there. We can convince them by the strength of our organisation and action to build struggle to understand their own collective strength, to analyse contradictions and target our main enemy, by our ability in struggle by promote clear strategy and tactics and to find the key link that cannot be ripped from our hands.
Organisation in struggle based on unity of all our Peoples is our key link.
Our key target is US imperialism.
Our goal is Australian independence and socialism. US imperialism out now!