Workers and students are facing a colossal cost of living crisis. While the official rate of inflation is 7%, the rising costs of essential items are much higher. Staple foods like cereals are up by 12%, and dairy is up a staggering 15%. The housing crisis makes this much worse; a whopping 331,000 households are in rental stress, and unit rents in capital cities have skyrocketed by 22% in just the past year.
 

Pile onto this the soaring price of electricity, up 15.5%, and gas, up 26.6%. Everything is rising except for workers' wages, which are down 7% in two years. This is the biggest fall in real wages since records began.
 

For Australia’s richest, things aren’t looking nearly so bleak. Corporate profits have soared 43.6% in the last four years, and the combined wealth of Australia’s richest 50 people has grown by a gargantuan 70%. Between 2009 and 2019, 93% of the wealth generated in Australia went to the richest 10%.
 

Dovetailing with the cost of living crisis is the growing mountain of student debt - $74 billion pooled between 3 million student graduates. Yet the Labor government is upholding the system of indexation of university student loans, meaning that student debt rises with the rate of inflation.
 

Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi put forward a bill in 2022 to freeze the ballooning student debt and raise the minimum repayment threshold, but a Labor-chaired Senate inquiry rejected the proposal. Labor’s decision will now burden the average HECS loan holder with an extra $1,700 in debt.
 

The government is telling students that we must plunge ourselves into debt if we want to study. With one third of all available jobs requiring a university degree, this is a path many of us are forced to walk.
 

The Labor government would have us believe that the cost of living crisis is an inevitability, that their hands are bound and that they’re doing their best. In the words of Treasurer Jim Chalmers: “we’ll do what we can to help, where we can.” In the same breath, Chalmers warned that raising the living standards of workers and students could “make the situation worse by making inflation worse. You do that if you spray too much money around.”
 

The Albanese Labor government has no qualms about pouring billions of dollars into the Australian military, with an estimated $368 billion to be spent on building nuclear submarines as part of the AUKUS pact with the US and Britain. But the government refuses to lift JobSeeker payments above the poverty level, despite its own experts calling for an increase to the “seriously inadequate” levels of unemployment support.
 

To tackle the cost of living crisis, Labor would have to do what it is unwilling to do—tackle the billionaires and big business. Scrapping the stage three tax cuts, which are nothing but a hand out to Australia’s richest, would save more than $240 billion over the next decade. Billions could be poured into healthcare, childcare and welfare with this change alone.
 

The government could also ease pressures for workers and students by legislating real wage rises, capping rents and energy bills, funding housing properly and wiping student debt.
 

It’s not just that Labor is unwilling to do this; through their policy inaction, they are energetically overseeing a historic transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich. Labor is on the side of the rich in this class war, and are as much to blame for the cost of living crisis as any of Australia’s billionaires and big businesses.
 

But this does not mean that we should just burrow in and try to weather the storm. Recent history tells us that when students mobilise en-masse to fight these attacks, we can win.
 

In 2014, the National Union of Students’ Education Office, then held by Socialist Alternative, led a nationwide campaign to smash the Abbott Government's attempts to deregulate university fees. Faced with the prospect of $100,000 degrees, students organised ongoing protests across the country, the Liberals could not step foot on a campus without meeting a crowd full of angry students. We eventually defeated the Liberals attempts to Americanise our education. This would not have been possible without an ongoing activist campaign.
 

This kind of organised student action is taking place throughout the world. Earlier this year, students at Manchester University in the UK participated in a rent strike, demanding the government introduce rental caps, and standing in solidarity with university workers on strike for better wages and working conditions. This is the type of fightback we need.
 

At the University of Melbourne, this fightback is starting now. On Wednesday, staff in the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) will be going on strike over wages, workloads and ongoing casualisation. After years of attacks from management, it’s great that NTEU members are taking this next step to fight for their rights, and it’s great to see students and the NUS Education Office standing in solidarity with them.
 

The strike will be happening from 11AM to 3PM this Wednesday May 3rd, with the student contingent meeting at 11AM in the New Student Precinct Amphitheatre. Join us in solidarity with striking staff, and to stand up for workers and students!

Maeve Russack and Remy Hannan are undergraduate student activists at the University of Melbourne. Maeve Russack was also a University of Melbourne Student Union delegate to the 2022 National Union of Students National Conference, caucusing with Socialist Alternative.