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“Australian Values” – How our rulers divide us

On 14 April, the Australian Liberal party announced a new immigration policy, which would elevate acceptance of “Australian Values” to a legal requirement for entry. The Department of Home Affairs already publishes an Australian values statement which can be optionally included when applying for a visa, but is not a legal requirement.

Shortly afterwards, in an interview with ABC Insiders, Liberal leader Angus Taylor responded to a question about migration by claiming that certain countries are “bad countries” – specifically those “ruled by fundamentalists, extremists and dictators” – and that migrants from these countries are more likely to be “bad people” who don’t subscribe to Australian values. Taylor named Iran specifically but declined to single out any other countries.

Anti-Iranian sentiment in particular has been making the rounds in the Australian media recently, with One Nation’s Pauline Hanson saying Australia should help “stamp out evil” by joining the US in its war on Iran, and calling for a total visa ban on Iranian nationals.

Australian Values

On Monday, February 9th, protestors gathered outside town hall in Sydney to protest a visit by Israeli president Isaac Herzog, who UN Commissioner Chris Sidoti said ”should be arrested on arrival [to Australia] for the crime of incitement to genocide”. After protestors refused to be moved on and demanded the right to march, the NSW police responded with extreme brutality. Video footage from the protest shows police pulling individuals out of the crowd and beating them, picking up people engaged in prayer and throwing them onto the pavement, and charging the crowd at speed. Premier Chris Minns has defended the actions of police and characterised protestors as an “angry and violent mob”.

The Australian values statement lists “freedom of speech, and freedom of association” as being important to our identity as Australians; these values were certainly exhibited by those gathering to make their voices heard on the 9th, but the same cannot be said for the state and its enforcers, who use violence and slander to suppress the voice of the people.

There is perhaps no clearer example of the rich and powerful misusing the legacy of working class Australians and New Zealanders than Anzac day. Since the first dawn services in the 1920s, Anzac day has been a solemn day of remembrance for the 60,000 Australians and 18,000 New Zealanders who gave their lives during the first world war. On this day, we are asked to honor these men for their courage, mateship, and self-sacrifice. 

But we must also remember why they were there at all. The first world war was an inter-imperialist conflict in which the capitalists of competing European powers sent thousands of workers to slaughter each other in an effort to redivide the world and gain access to new territories and markets for their respective empires. 

Here in Australia, recruitment propaganda was widely circulated that both appealed to men’s sense of duty to the nation and the British Empire, and raised the spectre of a German invasion of Australia. Having used these methods to recruit them, our rulers cynically sent these men off to die for a cause that they had no real stake in; that of lining the pockets of British imperialists.

Today, the legacy of these victims of imperialism is held up as a source of national pride by the richest and least principled among us. On Anzac day 2026, Mining sector billionaire Gina Rinehart gave a speech at the Sydney Opera House, in which she appropriated the Anzac legacy to support a reactionary tirade against everything from trans people to renewable energy to the pro-Palestine movement. But most disgusting of all, Rinehart also took the opportunity at this event, originally intended to ensure we never forget the futility and horror of war, to agitate for increased military recruitment and spending, including the purchase of long range missiles and “Israeli style domes”.

Both then and now, the contrast between those who fought and died for what they were led to believe was a noble cause and the shameless, manipulative, self-interested behaviour of those in power could not be clearer.

Iranian Values

Given current events on the world stage, it is necessary to begin any discussion around Iran by reiterating our position on the imperialist war currently being waged against it by the USA and Israel: ‘Hands off Iran!’ It is not the role of foreign imperialists to defeat the Islamic Republic, but of the Iranian masses themselves. We acknowledge the fact that the USA is the most powerful and reactionary imperialist force in the world today, and has a history of military interventions and regime change operations in the middle east which always leave the workers of the region worse off. We are for America’s defeat in Iran, which would strike a visible blow against imperialism and have positive consequences for the consciousness of workers everywhere. 

This does not prevent us from taking a clear-eyed view of the state of Iranian society in order to ascertain whether migrants coming from that society are in fact “bad people” who should be kept out of Australia.

On 29 December 2025, Tehrani Bazzaris called a strike in response to a dramatic collapse in the value of the Iranian rial, which undercut their ability to afford the basic necessities of life. The slogans raised at this strike, including “Death to the dictator!” and, “This is the final message; the target is the entire regime”, showed exactly who they felt was to blame; the hypocritical leaders of the Islamic Republic, whose response to decades of brutal sanctions imposed on their nation by the west was to engage in corruption and grift in order to maintain their privileged lifestyle and pass all the economic consequences off to the working class.

These protests quickly spread across the nation and escalated into a generalised revolutionary movement, with other groups – students, women, ethnic minorities – flocking to the banner and raising not just economic demands, but political ones; notably, the lifting of strict religious laws that restrict women’s freedoms, such as the requirement to wear a hijab in public.

To bring the movement under control, brutal oppression by the revolutionary guard was used in combination with a total internet blackout imposed to keep the masses from coordinating, with local health officials estimating 30,000 deaths for the 8–9 January alone. 

While the ongoing US/Israeli invasion has temporarily cut across these tensions and created a base of anti-imperialist support for the regime, the issues that gave rise to these protests cannot be resolved on a capitalist basis.

What we see here is not a nation with a single, shared set of values at all layers, but one sharply divided into classes with fundamentally opposed interests, and fundamentally differing sets of values.To speak simply of “Iranian values”, devoid of class differentiation, is a meaningless abstraction with no basis in the real world.

The Class Line

These examples expose the two sides of the rhetorical trick called nationalism: our national bourgeoisie try to paint the virtues displayed by the Australian working class as national values, implying they themselves share those values; and likewise paint the oppressive actions and attitudes of Iran’s bourgeoisie towards their own workers as national values which are shared by those being oppressed.

It is true that in this world, there are conflicting sets of values held by different groups – but you won’t find the line that divides these values on any world map. It is a class line – one which divides people like Angus Taylor, Gina Rinehart and Ayatollah Khamenei alike from the majority of those living on this planet.

The bourgeoisie would no doubt object to such a characterisation, saying that the class line Marxists draw is as arbitrary a designation, if not more so, than the national boundaries they put so much emphasis on. Let me preempt this criticism now.

Marxists understand that a person’s values are shaped by the social and material conditions in which they live, and with the vast wealth inequality that exists globally under capitalism there is much more common ground between the lived experience of daily struggle felt by working class people internationally than there is between the workers and bourgeoisie within any given nation. This is why the beliefs and attitudes of people tend to align better with class borders than national borders; as the global crisis of capitalism deepens, this divide is only becoming more pronounced.

Nationalism has long been a favourite tool of those seeking to cut across this tendency and divide the working class against itself. The reactionary role that nationalism plays in the world today is that it overlays a false narrative of the “clash of civilizations” and their allegedly incompatible value systems onto events that are actually manifestations of the class contradictions within capitalist society, and convinces a layer of the working class that they have more in common with their own oppressors than their class brothers and sisters in other nations.

Communists reject this narrative outright and call for the workers of the world; the producers of all the wealth in society; to unite in struggle against our shared class enemy. It is only through such unity that we can bring an end to oppression and exploitation, and build a society which reflects, in practice, the working class values we all share.

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