New laws not the end of WorkChoices
The final piece of Labor’s new industrial relations regime has been unveiled by Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard. The new legislation was hailed by Gillard and most of the...
University staff resist job cuts in Victoria
The shocking announcement a few weeks ago of the largest ever mass sackings in Australia’s higher education sector at Victoria University (VU) prompted a well attended protest rally in a quiet time of the...
NSW government pushes privatisation and cutbacks
In the context of the global financial crisis, governments across the world have abandoned financial conservatism, proposing significant expenditure programs, often funded through debt.
The Chinese government recently outlined...
NSW teachers vote for 48-hour strike
Twenty thousand teachers at meetings around NSW have voted to take 48 hours of industrial action at the start of the 2009 school year, in the event of the...
Nuke waste dump laws condemned
A strong community campaign involving Traditional Owners, health organisations, environment groups and the Central Land Council has called for immediate repeal of Howard-era legislation forcing a nuclear dump on...
New service fee will silence dissent on campus
In early November the Rudd government announced it would introduce a Student Service Fee of up to $250 per student which universities could choose to implement. This is to...
Labor axes CDEP and steps up the NT intervention
In early October, the Federal Labor Government announced major changes to the CDEP (Community Development Employment Programs). The changes have been met with outrage from affected Aboriginal communities.
While a...
Modeling shows loopholes in emission reductions plan
The Australian government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) is more about profit than planet.
When the Treasury modeling on the CPRS was released on October 30, Treasurer Wayne Swan...
Movement must take position on carbon trading
The Walk Against Warming rallies this year were smaller that last. This is largely because they had no particular clear demands, and they did not take a position on...
Global summits solve little as world economy slumps
It forecasts its members to record an overall fall of 0.3 per cent in 2009, with the US economy set to decline 0.9 per cent, Japan 0.1 per cent...
Revival of the socialist left in Malaysia
Over the weekend of November 8 and 9, the Socialist Party of Malaysia (PSM) hosted “Socialism 2008” in Kajang, a rapidly growing working class town near Kuala Lumpur.
The conference...
Foreign rivalry over resources fuels war in Congo
Renewed fighting in the Congo threatens to drag the country back into full-scale conflict, in a country where five million civilians died in war between 1998 and 2003.
The largest...
Mood for change sweeps the US
There were two million people in and around Chicago’s famous Grant Park (the site of the infamous 1968 anti-war protests) at midnight on November 5 to hear Barack Obama’s...
Can US workers unite across the race divide? Yes they can!
Obama’s election has buried the myth that the US white working class is inherently racist, hopelessly tied to the white elite.
Before the election we were told the so-called socially...
Socialist planning and alternatives to the market
The failure of free market policies evidenced by the collapse of major banks and big falls on the stockmarket raise whether there is an alternative to the market as...
Unions after the Rights at Work campaign
The union campaign against WorkChoices succeeded in getting Howard voted out, but has not put unions in a stronger position to organise and fight. Solidarity examines why.
Anti-union laws: How the penal powers were defeated
In 1969 over one million workers took part in a general stoppage and won the freedom of jailed union official Clarrie O’Shea and an end to the penal powers....
Putin’s Russia: back to the future?
Jarvis Ryan looks at the re-emergence of Russian power and explains its significance
The brief but bloody war between Russia and its neighbour and former colony Georgia, a small but...
Series exposes colonialism’s brutal history, but paints it as all in the past
Review: The First Australians
Directed by Rachel Perkins
Available on DVD soonThe First Australians is a six part television documentary series which attempts to portray on a national scale the impacts...
Symbol of Northern Ireland’s civil rights struggle
Review: Hunger
Directed by Steve McQueen
In selected cinemas nowThe film Hunger depicts the 1981 hunger strike of Irish Republican prisoner Bobby Sands. It is a stark reminder of the last...
Labor goes missing in the Howard years
Review: The Howard years
ABC1, November 17 to December 8
We survived the Howard years, and now you want us to watch it on Monday night prime time! That’s the sentiment...
Letters
Flannery a dubious ally
Anne Picot and I must have read different copies of Tim Flannery’s Quarterly Essay, “Now or Never” about global warming.
Flannery’s commitment to the market and carbon...
Things they say
“Banks are going to fail, so keep them individually small so that the failure of one can’t upset things.”
Paul Volker (former Chairman of the Reserve bank and economic adviser...
Land rights not leases
A MAJOR investment program in Aboriginal housing in the NT is being used as a weapon to further break up community control, push people out of remote areas and...
1949 coal strike: How Chifley lost Labor’s supporters
For decades, only the Left has talked about the 1949 coal miners’ strike, using it as an example of how low a Labor government can stoop—to the point of using soldiers to scab. So it should have been welcome news that the ABC had put resources into an hour-long dramatisation, Infamous Victory: Ben Chifley’s Battle For Coal. Unfortunately, the ABC has given us little to cheer about.
