We are once again pleased to support the Fair Australia Prize, this year co-sponsored by Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, and the newly formed United Workers Union. Members of both the National Union of Workers and United Voice came together to vote for the bigger and stronger union which officially came into being in November this year. Already we have taken action which speaks to the heart of this year’s theme: STRIKE!

‘New collectives, old struggles’, the theme behind this year’s Fair Australia Prize, is an attempt to encourage creative, literary and analytical work that gets to the heart of these questions. This year’s winning entries meet the challenge and they reflect the real diversity of the contemporary Australian working class – from a migrant farm worker with a talent for graphic design to a poetic construction worker to a PhD candidate dealing with shift work in hospitality to a musician and early childhood educator grappling with childcare in the Paris Commune.

In the three years since the Fair Australia Prize first began, as global inequality has increased, the failure of neoliberalism and capitalism have become clearer, sparking important debate here and overseas. If the system is no longer working, what do we do next?

After more than forty years of neoliberalism and its particular variant of capitalism, we are witnessing its slow collapse. We are faced with an existential climate crisis, hollowed-out democracies, escalating social tensions and economic inequality for millions of people. The status quo cannot hold.

In 1958, New Left thinker Raymond Williams published the influential essay, ‘Culture is Ordinary’, articulating through his own experience that, as the title suggests, culture is ordinary and is located in the everyday. Culture does not belong to any particular social class. Culture is not exclusionary. All over the world, workers and their families read and write poetry and literature. They visit art galleries and paint.