The Australian federal election campaign has had a total lack of discussion of the major crises facing the working class. The realities of genocide, trade war, recession and a looming world war, along with rapidly rising levels of poverty, are virtually unmentionable by the ruling Labor party and the opposition Liberal-National coalition.

Labor and the Coalition present a fantasy, claiming Australia will be shielded from these global developments. Labor’s Anthony Albanese and the Coalition’s Peter Dutton downplay the assaults by Trump on democratic rights, and vie to present themselves as best able to develop a relationship with the fascist would-be dictator.

The conspiracy of silence extends to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Five years on, COVID-19 is falsely treated as a historical event by governments, health officials, trade unions, and the entire corporate media.

Only the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) tells the truth. COVID-19 is a real and enduring threat to human life, and must be eliminated, using existing scientific expertise and by marshalling society’s resources to combat the virus. Human life must be the priority, not private profit.

What is needed includes universal masking, comprehensive testing and contact tracing, improved ventilation in all public spaces, and financial support for those affected by the pandemic. Such measures, combined with a massive investment in vaccines and pharmaceutical research and distribution, would be able to eliminate human transmission of COVID-19, safeguarding lives and preventing the damaging effects of repeated infection, known to increase the chance of Long COVID-19 and multi-organ failure.

In contrast Labor, the Coalition and Greens do not even address COVID-19 on their official campaign websites. Their leaders have raised nothing about the pandemic as an ongoing issue. In fact, in their pledges and policy documents regarding healthcare, COVID-19 is not mentioned even once.

However, COVID-19 remains the deadliest respiratory viral illness in Australia, with 3,852 deaths reported in 2024, a figure four times greater than influenza and Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) combined. It has officially caused the deaths of 25,791 people, and infected at least 12.1 million people, the largest death and infection toll experienced in this country since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–19.

Due to the dismantling of systematic contact tracing and testing, the rates of infection and deaths are significantly undercounted. In 2022 alone, there were at least 20,000 excess deaths that could only be attributed to the pandemic.

The responsibility for this mass infection and suffering lies with all the major parties, which consistently approached the COVID-19 pandemic from the standpoint that corporate profit had to be prioritised over the lives and health of the working people. “The cure cannot be worse than the disease,” they all declared.

The official silence on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic reflects the fear in ruling circles that demands would re-emerge from workers, calling for necessary public health measures to save lives and eliminate the disease.

The initial response of the capitalist class to the pandemic was indifference and malign neglect.

The Coalition government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison was only compelled to act in response to rising opposition in the working class. It belatedly moved to enact public health measures, including lockdowns and quarantines in March 2020, nearly three months after COVID-19’s emergence.

These measures, instrumental in saving tens of thousands of lives during the initial waves of the pandemic, were never intended to eliminate the virus. Morrison declared elimination would be “too costly,” and was supported by Labor and the trade unions.

Instead, hundreds of billions of dollars in support was handed out to companies and corporations, while unemployed workers received poverty level assistance. Healthcare funding was cut, and no improvements were made to schools, hospitals, and workplaces to reduce transmission and improve indoor air quality.

The pandemic was used to justify the formation of the “National Cabinet,” a de facto unity government of federal, state and territory leaders, that was given broad emergency powers despite having no constitutional basis.

At the time of its creation in March 2020, it included five state Labor premiers, and was responsible for greenlighting all the decisions made in managing the pandemic, including the criminal abandonment of public health measures.

Confronted with growing pressure from big business, governments, trade unions and the media began to agitate for the dumping of public health measures throughout 2021. The limited financial support for workers was ended, forcing them back to work and increasing the risk of disease transmission and COVID-19 outbreaks.

The removal of these mitigations was deeply unpopular among the working class. One expression of this was the landslide victory in the March 2021 Western Australian election by the incumbent Labor government, whose strict border controls had at that stage rendered the virus effectively non-existent within the state since May 2020.

Australian federal and state governments—Labor and Coalition alike—used the development of COVID-19 vaccines, and the emergence of the Omicron COVID-19 variant in November 2021, as the pretext for abandoning any attempt at mitigation and adopting the “let it rip” policy. The result has been repeated waves of COVID-19 infection, death and disability, with governments simply ignoring and marginalising the victims.

Popular opposition to this homicidal program, most closely identified with Morrison and New South Wales (NSW) Liberal Premier Dominic Perrottet, played a role in the Coalition’s collapse in the May 2022 federal election.

However, the Labor government moved quickly to dismantle quarantine, testing and contact tracing infrastructure, within months of its election. By October 2022, it had scrapped pandemic related sick leave, forcing workers to return to unsafe workplaces even when infected or face losing their jobs.

The Albanese government has made clear that the measures employed in the COVID-19 pandemic will never be used again.

A government-initiated inquiry chaired by pro-business figures into the pandemic promoted the “let-it-rip” approach and focussed excessively on the supposedly adverse impact of social distancing, lockdowns and school closures.

Despite noting that public health measures had likely saved tens of thousands of lives, the thrust of the inquiry’s findings were summed up by Labor’s health minister, Mark Butler, who declared: “We don’t want to do that next time. We don’t want to do that in the next pandemic.”

Labor has adopted the same approach to new pandemic threats. It has taken no coordinated action against the ongoing danger of the avian influenza (H5N1) spreading to humans. Labor belatedly pledged $95 million last October to monitor and research bird flu transmission, months after the deadly virus began spreading throughout global livestock.

At the same time, Labor governments—state and federal—have attacked the wages and working conditions of health workers, forcing them to accept sub-inflationary pay rises. The COVID-19 pandemic itself exposed the crisis in the hospitals and public health system, the result of decades of underfunding.

The Coalition are just as guilty, as are the Greens, who are desperate to form a coalition with Labor after the election on Saturday. All of them, as well as the pseudo-left Socialist Alliance and Victorian Socialists maintain a complete silence on the ongoing deaths from COVID-19.

From the outset, the SEP demanded a scientifically guided public health approach to eliminate the virus. We have exposed and opposed the criminality of capitalist governments, provided the means for principled scientists, doctors and public health workers to explain the true dangers of the pandemic, and to bring their research and knowledge to the working class.

We insist that the pandemic should not be “lived with” and warn that the official “forever COVID-19” policy can only lead to ongoing death and disability, which will primarily impact the working class.

The ongoing pandemic has pushed the already chronically under-resourced health system to breaking point. Hundreds of billions of dollars must be allocated to provide free high-quality health care as a basic human right to all who need it, with good pay and conditions for staff throughout the sector.

We understand that the fight to eliminate COVID-19 is an international one which will only succeed as part of the struggle to overturn capitalism and abolish its reactionary division of the world into rival nation states. The working class is the only means for fighting for this program.

We urge workers to join our campaign, vote for the SEP to show your support for socialism, and, above all, apply to join our party and build it as the necessary revolutionary leadership to end war, dictatorship and social misery created by capitalism.

Authorised by Cheryl Crisp for the Socialist Equality Party, Level 1/457-459 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills, NSW, 2010, Australia.