Rents soaring to record levels in Australia

Oscar Grenfell

Amid a general cost of living crisis which is acute across all essentials, including food and utilities, rising housing costs are pushing hundreds of thousands or possibly even millions to the financial brink.

Suburban housing in Hobart, the Tasmanian capital, Australia. [Photo by Graeme Bartlett / CC BY-SA 3.0]

Successive interest rate rises over the past year have driven up average monthly mortgage repayments by more than a thousand dollars. A protracted property boom means that house prices remain at unprecedented highs, with the median house price in Sydney, the country’s most-populous city, now pushing $1.5 million. With stagnant or falling wages, home ownership is out of the reach of broad layers, especially younger people.

Rents, however, are also skyrocketing. Figures released by the property group Domain for the June quarter and the last financial year show unprecedented annual increases, as well as a continuing acceleration of rental costs.

Across the country’s capital cities, median asking rents for houses increased by 11.5 percent over the 2022–23 financial year. Slight falls in smaller cities, such as Hobart and Canberra, masked far greater increases in larger population centers.

In Perth, the Western Australian capital, median asking house rents increased by 16 percent, from $500 a year ago to $580 now. In Melbourne, the increase was 13 percent, Sydney 12.9, Adelaide 12.5 and Brisbane 11.5 percent. Some 6.1 percent of the yearly increase in Sydney occurred in the June quarter alone.

The hikes were even starker in apartments. That is significant because the apartment market caters to lower-income people who cannot afford to rent a house.

Nationally, the increase in rents for the apartment market in capital cities exceeded 26 percent. That was driven above all by a 27.6 percent increase in Sydney, where median asking apartment rents went from $525 a week in June 2022, to $670 a year later. Over the June quarter alone, the increase was more than 8 percent, the highest quarterly rise recorded by Domain in the 20 years it has kept records.

Taken together, the figures indicate that house and unit rents in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth have reached their highest levels ever. While house rents in Darwin, historically a lower income city in northern Australia, are also at unprecedented heights.

The rental increases are affecting a broad range of the population. Separate data from property analysts at CoreLogic at the beginning of June found that more than 40 percent of renting households across the country had experienced an increase in rents of 10 percent or more.

The increases are inevitably having their greatest impact on poor and working-class households, along with lower sections of the middle-class, that do not have a substantial financial buffer.

In Sydney, for instance, the Domain figures showed apartment rents were up 36.4 percent annually in the inner south-west, 33.3 percent in the Parramatta region and city and inner south, and 30.8 in the inner-west. The first two areas include many working-class families. The inner-west, though increasingly more gentrified, has a large younger population including substantial numbers of students.

In Parramatta, the median weekly asking rent for a unit is now $600, while even in the solidly working-class outer south-west of Sydney it has reached $450.

The sharp increases in rents contrast starkly with the state of wages. The wage price index for the year to March increased by just 3.7 percent, far below inflation which has been running at around 7 percent. For the year to March, national apartment rents had increased six times faster than the 3.7 percent wage figure, and housing rents three times faster. Together with the broader inflation crisis, that means a vast cut to workers’ real disposable incomes.

An April report by the housing advocacy organization, Everybody’s Home, tabulated the incomes of various cohorts deemed to be essential workers, and compared them with average rents. The findings were of indicative value only, given that they were based upon average figures of wages and rental prices. They did not take into account cohabitation arrangements, including with marital and de facto partners, or savings and other background information.

The figures are nevertheless stark. The average net pay of an aged care worker, as of March, for instance, was just $747. If they were to rent an average dwelling alone, at $572, they would be spending 77 percent of their weekly take home pay on housing costs. For a meat packer, the percentage of weekly wages was 81 percent, as it was for hospitality workers. It was over 70 percent for postal workers, retail workers, delivery drivers, childcare workers and for other groups.

The study looked at how many days’ pay would be required for the different cohorts to fund average rental increases over the three years since March 2020. A hospitality worker and meat packer would have lost the equivalent of 41 days of pay to finance their rent rises, with over 30 days for most of the other sections of workers examined.

The impact of the price rises in the largest capital cities, such as Sydney, has presented an impossible situation for these essential, but generally low-paid sections of the working class. If they were to live alone in an average rental, a childcare worker would be paying 89 percent of their weekly income on housing, an aged care worker 87 percent, an ambulance officer 72 percent.

Everybody’s Home noted: “Our calculations suggest that essential workers in single households are likely to be in serious financial stress with little or no savings buffer, while workers in coupled households are likely to be financially dependent on a partner’s income.”

That was demonstrated by Nine Media polling this week, which found that 51 percent of all adult Australians said they would struggle to meet any unexpected expense, a figure up from 41 percent in February.

Rental vacancies remain at very low levels, especially in the capital cities where the figure is in many instances near or even less than one percent. Landlords with a mortgage are undoubtedly passing on increases resulting from the interest rate hikes, as well as the more general impacts of inflation.

The corporate media, many of whose outlets have a direct stake in the property market, have tended to present a sympathetic portrait of landlords themselves “doing it tough.” The picture they present is one of small-time investors who own one rental property and are making scarcely any money.

This is, however, not the reality. Data from the Australian Taxation Office, released in June but collected in 2020–21, found that 51.1 percent of rental properties belonged to an individual who owned at least 2.6 rental properties. That was 20 percent higher than two decades before, demonstrating an ever-greater concentration of investment housing ownership. For that year, 53 percent of landlords made a profit from their tenant, with a taking across the board of more than $10 billion.

Analysts cite general supply issues. They are, however, a product of the domination of the property industry by the most powerful financial interests, whose housing construction is based solely on concerns of private profit.

The broader issue of supply finds its starkest expression in the absence of affordable housing. Decades of underinvestment and privatisation has caused a precipitous drop in social housing stock, government-subsidised dwellings that are supposed to be affordable—from 7.1 percent of properties in 1991 to 4.2 percent by 2018.

Studies suggest that Australia’s social housing shortfall is already the equivalent of 524,000 properties and is set to reach 671,000 over the next decade.

That underscores the criminal character of government housing policies, which, combined with a rising population and growing financial distress, are calculated to worsen the situation. The federal Labor government’s stalled housing legislation was aimed at creating just 30,000 social and affordable dwellings over the next five years. Similarly pitiful proposals have been floated by the various state governments.

In New South Wales, the newly-elected Labor administration is centering its housing policies on a campaign for the further watering down of restrictions on property development. Premier Chris Minns has outlined a vision of more and more high-rise apartment buildings, especially in inner-city areas.

The transparent aim of this, and other policies, is not to increase housing supply so that rents go down. Instead the purpose is the opposite: to do everything possible to ensure property developments and high-end investors continue to rake in profits on the back of deepening social misery.

Can Thailand End Military Rule?

Kheetanat Synth Wannaboworn & Walden Bello

The next few days leading up to July 13 will probably be the most decisive days in Thailand after nearly a decade of military rule. The key question on everyone’s mind is: “Will the conservative forces allow the young leader of the Move Forward Party (MFP), Pita Limjaroenrat, to become the next prime minister?”

Naturally follows the second question, which is, if Pita is blocked, what will happen? Will people go out to the streets in protest?  Will soldiers be sent to disperse them? Will the violence of over 10 years ago, which led to the military’s ouster of a civilian government installed by popular vote, return to Bangkok?

A Very Fluid Situation

Optimism and pessimism, hope and fear co-exist among Thais these days, but with hope definitely on the ascendant. A sense of a new dawn for the country became unstoppable after the MFP unexpectedly won the most votes in the parliamentary elections on May 14.  It won 151 seats, besting its coalition partner, the Thaksin family-controlled Pheu Thai party, which raked in 141 seats. Left in the dust were the parties controlled by the ruling military regime, which gathered a measly 76 seats.

The MFP’s rise was nothing short of miraculous. Founded just five years ago, in 2018, it came in third in the 2019 parliamentary elections. Then, coming in first in 2023, it won 14 million votes, or 40 percent of votes cast, up from 13 percent in 2019.  The MFP frustrated every legal maneuver that the military-controlled Constitutional Court threw at it. The Court disqualified Future Forward founder Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit from serving in Parliament, along with several other winners in the 2019 elections. The Court followed this up by dissolving Future Forward and banning its executives from politics for 10 years in February 2020, only to see it resurrected as Move Forward a month later, with a new leader, Pita, who declared that “Move Forward is the new chapter of Future Forward.”

Viewed in retrospect, however, these earlier hurdles were not as big as the challenge Move Forward now faces, which is to enforce recognition of the right to form the government and enact promised reforms to the country’s entrenched power structure. To be prime minister, Pita must get 376 votes from the 750 members of the bicameral National Assembly. He already has 312 votes and needs 64 more from either rival parties in the Lower House or from the 250-person Senate whose members were appointed by the military. Pita says he already has the necessary 64 votes, but this may be part of the psychological warfare leading up to July 13.

The Dilemma of the Thai Establishment

The military, though discredited, remains a powerful force. Other rival parties, such as the formerly influential Democrats that suffered a stunning collapse to only 25 seats, may refuse to come to the aid of what they see as an upstart party. Another party, the Bhumjaithai Party, which fancies itself as a kingmaker, asserted that its 71 seats would not go to “the party that has a proposal to amend or abolish Article 112” of the Thai criminal code, the notorious lese majeste law. The most decisive force that will shape the outcome of July 13 is the Senate, whose members were appointed by the military. The senators consider their role as the old guard of the Kingdom’s three pillars—”Nation, Religion, and the King.” Although some senators have declared they will vote for the will of the people, others have announced that they could not support the Party that advocates the “overthrow the monarchy.”

The issue is the MFP’s position on the lese majeste law.  Although sympathetic to the youth-led protest movement’s demand that the royal defamation law be abolished, during the election campaign and after the May election, the MFP came out with a position that explicitly seeks reform rather than abolition of the draconian law that imposes long-term jail sentences on those judged to be insulting or defaming the royal personality. According to MFP MP Rangsiman Rome, the party’s position is to “reform the law, for instance, by stipulating that one cannot accuse a person of lese majeste simply by running to the police; this has to be done through a legal process handled by one government agency that carefully assesses the charge.”

Not surprisingly, some supporters of MFP have been critical of its retreat from the abolitionist position, while others have seen this as evidence of its pragmatic side, one that is necessary for it to govern a complex, fractured polity. It is likely that the party debate leading up to the new position was intense.

But whether the MFP’s position is to abolish or to reform the law, the royal palace, with its strong influence on the unelected, some observers contend that the hand-picked senators will be the real kingmaker on July 13.

A New Era in Thai Politics

Whatever happens on July 13, Thailand has already stepped into a new era. The significance of the MFP’s stunning victory at the polls has a number of dimensions.

+ The youth vote, that is, Gen Z and Millennials, made the difference in the electoral outcome. In this connection, it must be pointed out that opposition in the streets spearheaded by young people who defied the military, sporadically at first but more massively since 2017, created the context for the emergence of an electoral party whose parliamentarians have an average age of 39.

+ The extremely poor performance of the government coalition, along with that of traditional parties like the Democrats that cooperated with the generals, represented a decisive repudiation of military intervention in politics and a call for the generals to return to the barracks and stay there.

+ The MFP’s outstripping its coalition partner Pheu Thai as the country’s leading party, along with the extremely poor performance of the Democrats, may mean that at last the citizenry has moved beyond the “Red” versus “Yellow” divide that wracked Thailand before the coup of 2014. Pheu Thai had mobilized mainly the rural masses of the North and Northeast in support of Thaksin Shinawatra’s populist politics, while the Democrats had agitated Bangkok’s middle classes in support of the country’s traditional elites. During the May 2023 elections, in many areas, notably the north, northeast, and Bangkok, significant numbers of former red and yellow antagonists found themselves together in the orange MFP camp. Observers cited many instances of families that had split for years into red and yellow factions uniting under the MFP banner. “There are no longer any reds or yellows in our family,” one Bangkokian told us happily.  “We all voted for MFP.”

+ The MFP ran a strikingly unique campaign by focusing on issues and policies instead of appealing to people’s traditional personal or party loyalties. Unlike the other parties, it did not buy votes, and this was not only because it had no money to do so but out of principle and a conviction that people were tired of the old personalistic, clientelist politics. Leading up to the May elections, the party assembled a program based on 300 policy positions, from military reform to LGBTQ rights to animal rights, seeking to show the electorate that it was a large tent that had a place for every voter’s special concern.

“We won the soldiers’ votes,” MP Rome told us at a briefing at the party’s headquarters, commenting on one of the more interesting electoral outcomes. “It showed that enlisted men and women agreed with our platform for military reform, which sought to create a truly professional army, where recruits would not be hazed and people would advance by merit rather than by connections.” Former MP Kunthida Rungruengkiat, who now heads the MFP’s Progressive Movement Foundation, added, “I still remember one forum where one personality of a traditional party said, ‘MFP’s brand of politics is a threat to all of us old parties, whether of the government or opposition.’ He was right.”

The Thai establishment is caught on the horns of a very big dilemma. It knows that depriving Pita of the prime ministership on July 13 will be a very costly move, with unpredictable but uniformly negative consequences. But even if it does manage to do this, it seems impossible for it to resist for long the momentum of the Move Forward Party. It hears loud and clear the overwhelming message from the electorate: to get out of the way of change.

It is a message that is reinforced in everyday life. It used to be that all moviegoers stood when the royal anthem flashed on the screen. Now most people remain seated, waiting impatiently for the main feature to begin.

European Parliament Approves Vicious Anti-Cuba Resolution

W.T. Whitney Jr.

Photograph Source: Diliff – CC BY-SA 3.0

Signs were evident. Touring Spain in May, the Cuban musical duo Buena Fe (Good Faith) had their concerts disrupted by thugs; some were canceled.  A month later in Paris, protests orchestrated by a Cuban émigré university professor forced a prestigious poetry festival to withdraw the honorary presidency it was going to award Cuban poet Nancy Morejón.

On July 12, Cuba’s unstable relations with European governments went downhill fast. The European Parliament approved a “Resolution on the state of the EU-Cuba PDCA in the light of the recent visit of the High Representative to the island.” There were 359 votes in favor, 226 against, and 50 abstentions.

The PDCA is the Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement that, facilitated by the European Council and signed in 2016, was supposed to encourage individual countries to downplay differences with Cuba in favor of European consensus and “constructive engagement.” It was to have “supported the process of economic and social modernization in Cuba.”

The PDCA replaced the EU’s “Common Position” that, from 1998 on, promoted relationships that Cuba regarded as “unilateral, interventionist, selective and discriminatory.”

Josep Borrell, the top EU diplomatic representative, had indeed visited Cuba in May on behalf of the PDCA. He was offering “support for the increasingly important Cuban private sector” and collaboration “in expanding economic reform taking place” in Cuba.

The resolution’s scope, with 60 themes, is vast, with lies sprinkled throughout. The flavor is apparent with these items:

• “Whereas … the Cuban Criminal Code … [allows for] ‘thousands of people [to be] sentenced to between one and four years of imprisonment every year, without there being any attributable crime …”

• “Whereas on 11 July 2021, the largest protests in Cuba since the 1994 ‘Maleconazo’ took place; whereas numerous protesters have been detained in Cuba since the July 2021 protests…”

• “The EP condemns the use of torture and ill treatment by the Cuban authorities …”

• “… Condemns the Cuban regime’s support for the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and its defense of Russia and Belarus.

• “… Reiterates its call on the Council to … adopt sanctions against those responsible for the persistent human rights violations in Cuba, starting by sanctioning [President] Miguel Díaz-Canel …”

The European Parliament’s action signaled for Cuba that relations with the EU will likely turn stormy and no longer be merely inconvenient and unpredictable. That’s surely the goal, especially if there’s substance to a commentator’s charge that many of “these parliamentarians” have links “with CIA officers and diplomats stationed at the U.S. embassy in Brussels and Luxembourg”.

The result, according to Spanish EP delegate and Communist Party member Manuel Pineda, is that,  “this Parliament has become a loudspeaker for the most reactionary and extreme right-wing positions, contaminating and clouding what should be the house of Europe’s sovereignty.”

The EP’s “Euroskeptic and anti-federalist” European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) had introduced the resolution.  ECR “shadow rapporteur” Herman Tertsch, a member of Spain’s rightwing Vox Party, explained that, “The resolution is a further step towards ending the EU’s intolerable complicity with the Cuban dictatorship and that of its High Representative, Josep Borrell.”

“The Cuban communists, like communists all over the world,” he observed, “will hopefully end up in the dustbin of history as wretches, murderers and failures.” He denounced “their accomplices in the democracies of America and Europe.”

The European Union is by far Cuba’s biggest trading partner and most foreign investment in Cuba comes from EU countries, as do more than one third of the tourists visiting Cuba. Having contributed €100 million over many years, as of 2021, the EU has donated most of the developmental assistance that Cuba has received.

The timing of the EP’s anti-Cuban resolution was significant. The vote missed by one day the two-year anniversary of the large anti-government protests occurring in Cuba on July 11, 2021.  U.S. Secretary of State Blinken took the occasion to insist that “The United States stands in solidarity with those in Cuba who continue to desire a free democracy.”

Additionally, a long-anticipated heads-of-state summit meeting between the EU and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) took place soon after the vote, on July 17-19 in Brussels. The CELAC alliance includes all Western Hemisphere nations except the United States and Canada,

Preceding this summit were EU meetings with pre-CELAC regional alliances and CELAC-EU summit meetings in 2013 and 2015. The recent hiatus resulted from EU displeasure with “popularly elected governments and leaders” in Latin America. Now the object is to foster “respectful interchange” and to “acknowledge mutual interests.”

Chinese competition with Europe in Latin America and the Caribbean over trade, access to natural resources, and investment opportunities may have provided further encouragement.

Reflecting official sentiment ahead of the summit, journalist Claudia Fonseca Sosa stated that, “For Cuba, it’s important that … dialogue in Brussels be serious, participative, and diverse.”  But aspirations she expressed of  “consensus and bridge-building” are the very ones being stymied by the EP’s resolution.

The Foreign Relations Commission of Cuba’s National Assembly charged that, “The EP Resolution represents harassment of European businesses investing in Cuba or seeking to do so. It also expresses the will of extreme rightwing political forces to deprive the EU of its own independent policy toward Cuba … [and] contributes to the U.S. effort to isolate Cuba internationally and justify its genocidal blockade.”

In fact, “Adoption of this resolution singling out one … country violates principles of respect, inclusion and cooperation that were basic to the Third EU-CELAC Summit and casts doubt on EU intentions to restore relations with the region.”

Rightwing elements in the EP tried to undermine the EU-CELAC summit. They hit at the Cuban government’s perennial efforts to overcome isolation and gain a measure of protection against U.S. assaults.

As these two inter-related happenings pile on new grief for Cuba, the impression emerges of the shifting nature and operating methods of Cuba’s counter-revolutionary opposition, changes that are in line with how rightwing extremists are causing trouble elsewhere.

Cuban political analyst Iramís Rosique Cárdenas refers to the traditional rightwing current with “known liberal discourse of private property, market fundamentals, a minimum state … and with social democratic cooperation.” But another one operates through “a series of movements and organizations of the right and extreme right.” Their ideas, “held in common,” include: national chauvinism, reliance on strong states, economic protectionism, provincialism instead of multi-culturalism, xenophobia, “centrality of the traditional family,” discrimination against excluded minorities, nationalism, and religious fundamentalism.

He adds that, “The rightwing extremism active in the West displays virulent hostility against Latin American progressivism, especially the Bolivarian process, and against movements and states viewed as ‘remnants’ of 20th century communism or that, like China and Cuba, answer back to European and North American centers of power. The weakness of the left, especially in most industrialized countries, has contributed to its rise.”

Netherlands: Rutte’s resignation further emboldens the far-right

Parwini Zora & Daniel Woreck

On July 7, Mark Rutte, prime minister of the Netherlands since 2010, resigned. Three days later, he announced that he would not lead his People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) in the upcoming elections in November. Until then he will head a caretaker government.

Rutte is, after Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the longest serving prime minister in the European Union. His ability to cobble together various coalitions in a parliament divided into more than ten parties gave him the nickname “Teflon-Mark”.

Mark Rutte (centre) with Geert Wilders (right) and Maxime Verhagen (left) in 2010 [Photo by Minister-president Rutte / CC BY 2.0]

In 2010, Rutte’s first minority government relied on the parliamentary support of Geert Wilders’ neo-fascist Party For Freedom (PVV), which until then had been considered taboo. In 2012 he formed a coalition government with the Labor Party (PvdA). In 2016 he brought together a shaky four-party coalition with the Christian Democrats (CDA), the liberals (D66) and the Calvinists of the Christian Union (CU).

Rutte’s third government collapsed shortly before the 2021 election, because it had falsely accused thousands of families of social fraud and forced them to make repayments. As a result, 26,000 families were facing bankruptcy. After ten months of negotiations behind the scenes, the same coalition was reestablished. It only lasted eighteen months.

While Rutte’s coalition partners changed, his political agenda was moving steadily further to the right. His thirteen years in office were marked by pro-business policies, severe austerity, militarism and abetting the far-right.

Faced with a looming vote of no confidence in his deeply unpopular government, Rutte provoked its demise in a way that will put refugee policy at the center of the campaign and again benefit the far-right in the upcoming election. He insisted on a two-year waiting period before children of “recognised refugees” living in the Netherlands could join their parents, knowing full well that his Christian coalition partners would not accept this.

At a press conference on Friday night, Rutte said, “It’s no secret that the coalition parties think very differently about asylum policy and today we unfortunately need to draw the conclusion that the differences are unbridgeable. The fall of a government is never good. But it is sometimes impossible in a coalition country like the Netherlands to come to one agreement.”

The far-right has systematically scapegoated migrant workers and asylum seekers, accusing them of responsibility for all social evils, especially the acute housing crisis. While the Netherlands received only 46,000 asylum applications last year, the longstanding and accumulated housing shortage is the result of decades of relentless cuts to social housing. Currently, the nationwide shortage of homes is at least 390,000 with predictions for a shortage of nearly a million by the year 2030.

Rutte was only able to stay in office for 13 years and to weather various scandals because all parties, from the so-called “left” to the far right, support his reactionary agenda. Faced with a deep social and political crisis the entire Dutch political establishment is maneuvering to divert social discontent from questions such as the rising cost of living, deteriorating working conditions and the war in Ukraine, into anti-immigrant hatred and support for a draconian asylum policy.

When Rutte announced his resignation in parliament all parties in the official opposition, including the nominal left, showered him with praise.

Wilders said, “We have excellently worked together politically, including in the first two years of the Rutte I administration… Your choices were not ours, but you brought them with conviction and that deserves an awful lot of respect.”

He went on to briefly outline to the media how closely the two party leaders have been, commenting, “We have known each other for a very long time. We were once colleagues in the VVD. I was even his mentor.” In a further tweet, Wilders said that Rutte’s resignation would make the Netherlands a “beautiful country again, with fewer asylum seekers and crime, more money and housing for our own people.”

The leader of the Green Left Party (GroenLinks), Jesse Klaver responded, “What I would like to say to you, Mark, is: what I have appreciated in all those times that we have crossed swords is that we never made it personal, that we have always kept it substantive.”

Lilian Marijnissen from the former Maoist Socialist Party (SP) characterized Rutte’s departure as a “sensible decision” and as “good for the Netherlands.”

While the official “left” praised Rutte, his government was deeply hated among broad sections of the working class. Following his resignation an opinion poll conducted by the popular TV program EenVandaag found that almost three in four respondents said it would be “unacceptable” for Rutte to return as prime minister after November’s election.

His resignation came against a backdrop of fierce class struggles across all sectors. Particularly since the beginning of 2023, the Netherlands has been shaken by a wave of strikes in the public and private sector, as thousands of Dutch workers entered into struggles for better wages, working and living conditions. These struggles coincided with mass protests and strikes in France against President Macron’s pension reform.

Rutte’s four successive governments were responsible for policies of severe austerity both in the Netherlands and the European Union. After the 2009 Euro crisis he was, together with German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, the main advocate of imposing severe austerity measures on Greece, Portugal, Spain and other countries. He increased the budget for the state apparatus – from police, surveillance and secret service to prisons and judiciary – entrenched institutional racism and stepped-up systematic oppression of the socially marginalised and vulnerable.

With 60 percent of Dutch households having struggled to pay their utility bills last year, nearly 5 percent of the population lives below the official poverty line, with an additional 220,000 considered as working poor, 320,000 officially unemployed, 32,000 homeless and 120,000 depending on food banks that grew by a third during the last quarter of 2022.

Given this grim record of deliberate social devastation, the number of households living below the poverty line is expected to shoot up to one million out of a population of just 17.8 million by 2024, according to the Dutch Centraal Planbureau (CPB), which will mean an increase of childhood poverty to 7 percent.

Rutte was also responsible for the criminal handling of the pandemic, carrying out “herd immunity” policies from the outset which have cost over 22,000 deaths officially and at least 375,000 Long Covid patients.

One of the most critical aspects of the current socio-political crisis in the Netherlands is the rapid escalation of NATO’s proxy war against Russia. A few hours after Rutte’s resignation, Ukrainian President Zelensky tweeted thanking Rutte for the “steadfast principled stand of the Netherlands regarding the Russian invasion and for recognizing the Holodomor as genocide by the House of Representatives.”

Since the 2014 far-right coup in Kiev, orchestrated by the US and its NATO allies, brought to power a pro-NATO government in Ukraine, the Dutch government has played a significant role in inciting anti-Russian sentiment. Rutte played a leading role in blaming Russia for the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 in July 2014. The crash killed 298 passengers and crew.

Ever since, Rutte’s government has stoked anti-Russian hysteria. The total value of the military support that the Netherlands has supplied to Ukraine stands at a staggering €1.9 billion, at the cost of further inroads to already meagre social spending. The Dutch “support package” to Ukraine includes weapons, ammunition, vehicles, maritime vessels, de-mining equipment, bridges, fuel, medical supplies and rations.

As Politico noted, Rutte, notwithstanding his right-wing trajectory, was “described by colleagues and friends as a manager, rather than a visionary leader, who succeeded in getting rival parties to talk and find compromises. He was the incarnation of Dutch consensus culture: pragmatic, flexible — and visionless”.

In view of the escalation of the NATO war with Russia and class war at home, the Dutch ruling elite has concluded that a “manager” is no longer enough. In the absence of an independent political movement of the working class, the former colonial power seeks to install an even more right-wing government.

The emergence of the right-wing populist party BBB (Farmer-Citizen Movement) that gained senate power at the recent provincial elections, is a warning. Despite its presentation as a pro-peasant movement by the media, the BBB, founded in 2019, has exploited protest votes directed against the Rutte government for far-right political ends.

According to polls at the end of June, Rutte’s VVD and the BBB were neck and neck, with 18 percent of the vote, followed by Wilders’ PVV with 10 percent, the GreenLeft, D66 and the social democratic Labour Party (PvdA) trailed with 8 percent each and the Socialist Party with 6 percent.

The responsibility for this shift to the right lies squarely with the parties of the nominal “left”. The PvdA, GreenLeft and the Socialist Party have supported Rutte’s “herd immunity” policies and are complicit in the stoking of xenophobic and Islamophobic sentiments against immigrant workers. In the absence of an independent revolutionary leadership of the working class, the far-right has been able to exploit the anger and frustration of desperate middle-class and impoverished layers for its reactionary ends.

The PvdA, once a major party of government in the Netherlands, and GreenLeft are so discredited that they plan to field a combined manifesto and candidates list for the upcoming general election. The SP will run its own slate.

What is happening in the Netherlands is part of an international development. In Spain, the ruling class is returning to its fascistic roots linked to the Franco regime, on the backs of the social democrats and the pseudo-left. The bourgeoisie in Germany too is reviving its fascist traditions and is engaged in an unprecedented military rearmament.

London housing rental crisis: “A bad situation is now becoming disastrous”

Dennis Moore

The number of rental properties in London has fallen substantially since the pandemic according to research from the London School of Economics (LSE) and property firm Savills.

A shortage of rental properties is forcing record numbers of tenants into temporary accommodation.

Avondale Square estate, Bermondsey, London [Photo by Stephen Craven / CC BY-SA 2.0]

The number of one-, two- and three-bedroom properties available to rent across London was down by 36 percent in January-March 2023 compared to the same period in 2017-2019. Available four-bedroom rental properties fell by 46 percent in London, compared to 33 percent for the rest of the UK.

Rental affordability has worsened dramatically as the gap between supply and demand has widened. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) surveyed tenants in February 2023 and found that half had experienced rent increases in the last year.

The LSE found that average rents listed for London were 20 percent above pre-Covid levels.

The overall lack of rental properties has seen an explosion in demand, with prospective tenants forced into bidding wars that have forced renters to offer above market value to secure accommodation.

A landlord who took part in an LSE focus group reported receiving 35 enquiries in one day about a vacant property. Asking prospective tenants to give their best offer, the owner received £350 above the monthly asking price, with one person offering to leave a deposit without even viewing the property.

An estimated 300,000 London renters who are dependent on housing benefits are being priced out of the private sector.

The dire shortfall between LHA rates and rents is confirmed by research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, showing that just 5 percent of properties on the Zoopla platform are covered by housing benefit, compared with 23 percent when LHA rates were frozen in April 2020.

Emma Haddad, CEO of housing charity St Mungo’s, has called on the government to increase housing benefits to prevent people ending up on the streets.

With nowhere to live, increasing numbers of people are turning to local authorities. But the public housing system, largely run by local councils, has no capacity to help.

Councils in London have an estimated 166,000 people living in temporary accommodation, a number equal to the entire population of some London boroughs, or the population of cities the size of Oxford.

Local authorities are collectively spending £52 million each month on temporary accommodation, including hostels and refuges. They have warned that suitable accommodation is becoming increasingly difficult to acquire.

With a population of 9 million, London accounts for two thirds of all those living in temporary accommodation.

Darren Rodwell, London Councils’ executive member for regeneration, housing and planning, said, “A bad situation is now becoming disastrous. We’re seeing fast rising private rents and reduced availability of rental properties against a backdrop of continuing cost of living pressures and London’s long-standing shortage of affordable housing.”

Growing numbers of people are sleeping on the streets of London, with the Conservative government’s manifesto promise to eradicate rough sleeping by 2024 in tatters.

At the same time, home ownership is an ever-receding prospect for millions of people. According to Generation Rent it takes UK renters almost 10 years to save for a mortgage deposit.

Generation Rent’s director Ben Twomey said, “That gets close to two decades for Londoners and that’s only possible by sharing with other people into their forties.”

The rise in interest rates is putting intense pressure on monthly mortgage repayments, with a looming threat that many will lose their homes.

Recent forecasts by the Bank of England show that among 4 million homeowners expected to roll over to a new mortgage contract in the next three years, the majority will be paying an extra £220 each month by the end of this year.

By the end of 2026, nearly one million UK homeowners will need to find an extra £500 a month for mortgage repayments due to rising interest rates.

Mortgage providers say that households fixing deals now will face a typical increase of £350 per month in repayments. According to Moneyfacts, average two-year fixed mortgage rates rose last Monday by 6.7 percent--the highest level since the middle of the financial crisis in 2008.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned that interest rate rises are hitting landlords’ borrowing costs and were part of the reason for the increases in rents.

Landlords have passed on higher mortgage repayments via rent hikes to an estimated 9.2 million tenants. Over 50 percent of landlords in England have a buy-to-let mortgage, with figures from UK Finance showing 2 million are outstanding, with 230,000 about to exit cheaper fixed-rate deals between March 2023 and March 2024.

Almost two thirds of surveyors reported rising numbers of buy-to-let landlords are looking to sell their properties, according to the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, potentially reducing further the number of available properties to rent.

The freezing of the LHA rate and increased rent rises are a perfect storm for hundreds of thousands of renters amid the worst cost-of-living crisis in generations. Private rent paid by tenants across the UK rose by 5 percent in the twelve months to May 2023, the biggest jump since January 2016. Outside London, rents surged at the fastest rate since 2006.

Matt Downie, CEO of housing charity Crisis said, “Low-income renters face a catastrophe. They can’t rely on housing benefit as it’s been frozen since March 2020 and is completely inadequate. There isn’t enough social housing to go round and over a million households are on waiting lists for the few genuinely affordable homes we do have.”

Australian universities defunded by successive governments

Mike Head

Federal Minister for Education Jason Clare (right) with University of New South Wales Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Attila Brungs. [Photo: UNSW Media]

A report published this month provides a revealing, yet distorted, picture of how far Australian governments have slashed funding for universities over the past three decades and increasingly transformed them into corporate entities.

The report calculates that federal government funding for universities, excluding the HELP fees loan system that students must repay after graduation, fell from 0.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1995 to 0.6 percent in 2021. That amounts to a $6.5 billion reduction in funding in 2021, equal to almost half (46.5 percent) of current higher education funding.

The report, produced by the Centre For Future Work, an arm of the Australia Institute think tank, and commissioned by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), shows that successive governments have defunded universities. This has forced them to rely ever-more heavily on private sources of cash, particularly full fee-paying international students and corporate partnerships, while casualising their workforces and ramping up class sizes.

Since 1995, private sources have doubled as a share of university revenue—increasing from 21.7 percent to an all-time high of 43 percent in 2019. Thus, the label “public” universities is no longer accurate. They have become substantially privatised.

Other findings of the report point to the damage done to staff and students.

• Casualisation is rampant. Between 1999 and 2019, casual employment grew by 4.5 percent per year, almost twice as fast as total employment. By best estimates, casual employment now accounts for 40 percent of jobs at public universities.
• Degrees are becoming more expensive for students. Average HELP debt has doubled since 2008: increasing from $12,990 to $24,771 in 2022.
• Despite a Labor government review of higher education in 2008 finding that rising student-staff ratios were jeopardising the quality of teaching and the learning support provided to students, class sizes have become even bigger since 2008.
• One of the clearest indications that public universities are being run like businesses is the salaries of vice chancellors, which averaged almost $1 million in 2020, putting them in the same league as corporate CEOs.

However, the report presents this process misleadingly. First, it is silent on how this offensive has been possible. It says nothing about the role of the NTEU and the other main campus union, the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) in stifling the resistance of university workers over many years.

Second, it chooses timelines that coincide with Liberal-National governments, thus camouflaging the pivotal part played by the Labor governments of 1983‒96 and 2007‒13, as well as the deeper cuts already made by the current Albanese Labor government.

For example, the report states:

While Federal Government funding for higher education has grown in nominal terms, it has not even kept up with inflation—let alone the growing population and enrolments. Figure 1 shows that in the decade since 2013, funding for higher education fell by 2.4 percent in real terms (after adjusting for inflation) by 2022‒23. This is despite growth in domestic student enrolment of 18 percent between 2013 and 2021, and the expectation of continued enrolment growth into the future. The combination of a decline in real federal funding with growth in enrolment has produced a more dramatic decline in the amount of real federal spending per domestic student.

Figure 1 in the report, however, shows that this decline began in 2011‒12, during the final years of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Labor governments, not 2013, when the Abbott Liberal-National government took office and continued Labor’s cuts.

In fact, the Rudd-Gillard government laid the basis for the accelerating pro-corporate restructuring of the universities through its market-based “education revolution.” It scrapped block funding for universities and forced them to compete for funds based on enrolments. It then cut tertiary education funding by some $3 billion in 2012‒13.

The earlier Hawke-Keating Labor government paved the foundations for this transformation by reintroducing fees, first for international students, turning them onto cash cows to offset declining funding, and then for domestic students, through the HECS (now HELP) loans scheme, loading students with huge debts.

The current Albanese government is intensifying this process. Its May 9 budget increased higher education spending for 2023‒24 only from $10.6 billion to $10.9 billion. That is less than 3 percent—a cut of about 4 percent in real terms compared to inflation.

Even more fundamentally, the Albanese government has launched a review of tertiary education—its University Accord—which aims to further subordinate universities to the demands of business, and the military and intelligence apparatus.

In the opening words of the discussion paper issued in February by the government’s handpicked advisory panel: “The Australian Government is working to establish an Australian Universities Accord to drive lasting alignment between Australia’s high quality higher education system and national needs.”

These “national needs” refer to the private profit, geo-strategic and military requirements of the Australian capitalist class, particularly for vocational training to meet the narrow needs of employers, and for the dedication of research to commercial and war preparation purposes.

That was highlighted by the April visit of Universities Australia (UA) chief executive Catriona Jackson to Washington to commit Australian universities to the development of nuclear-powered submarines and other hi-tech weaponry for the AUKUS pact and US-led war preparations against China.

This focus on corporate profit and war plans necessarily involves denying students the essential social right to an all-round critical education, exposing them to the full richness and historical content of human thought, and depriving educators and researchers of the capacity to conduct genuinely socially-useful and scientifically-important teaching and research.

Nevertheless, the NTEU is urging university workers and students to support the Labor government’s review, just as the NTEU did with the last review conducted by the Rudd-Gillard government, which became the basis for the “education revolution’s” market-driven regime.

In an email to NTEU members, promoting the “must-read” report, NTEU president Alison Barnes declared: “As we head towards a major reform of the higher education sector, these findings make it impossible to ignore that our sector needs to change, and this is our chance to have a say on our future.”

However, the NTEU’s submission to the Accord panel is aligned with the Labor government’s pro-business objectives. It calls for a higher education sector that “provides the graduates with the necessary skill sets for future productivity.”

The NTEU bureaucrats have a long record of suppressing educators’ hostility to the increasing corporatisation of universities, even when they claim to oppose it. While striking rotten enterprise bargaining deals with individual university managements, all designed to facilitate restructuring, the NTEU machine has blocked any unified mobilisation against it.