Peter Boyle

Opposition leader Tony Abbott and his co-thinkers are dead wrong. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, established by activists 40 years ago, is as relevant as it was then.

Early on January 26, Abbott told reporters he understood why the embassy was set up “all those years ago”, but said it was not relevant today.

By now we all know that the rich get richer under capitalism. But many are astounded at the incredible pace this takes place.

Last week it was reported that Australian billionaire James Packer celebrated a 560% increase in his casino investment in Macau. Great reward for making totally unproductive, indeed socially and morally destructive, investments.

Pat Eatock, a veteran of the 1972 Aboriginal Tent Embassy, was recently splashed all over the news holding the Prime Minister's shoe.

The shoe was lost when Julia Gillard was clumsily evacuated with opposition leader Tony Abbott by her panicked security detail from a function just 100 metres from the 40th anniversary gathering at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy.

The gathering took place next to the Old Parliament House in Canberra on January 26.

Rupert Murdoch's flagship newspaper, The Australian, has been on a campaign to destroy the Greens because the party represents a big electoral break from the two-parties-for-capitalism system that has dominated politics in this country for more than a century. In the past two weeks, this campaign has been hyped into McCarthyite Cold War hysteria.

The eighth national conference of the Socialist Alliance in Australia decided to take a draft document titled “Towards a socialist Australia” through a nationwide public discussion and consultation process to promote a wide discussion about socialism in the 21st century.

After an intense year of political activity in 2011, Socialist Alliance members have been preparing for the organisation’s eighth national conference, which will be held in Sydney over January 20-22.

Happy New Year and thank you to all our supporters. You helped us raise $203,200 for our 2011 Fighting Fund. This is a great effort, even though we made only 81% of our target of $250,000.

The big upsurge in political activity — spurred on by the “Arab Spring” revolts and the Occupy and Indignado movements — probably meant that less activist time was available for fundraising. But it also made the Green Left project even more significant.

Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, of the Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) ,was acquitted on January 9 by the country’s High Court of the second round of politically motivated “sodomy” charges. He was jailed for six years under the former Barisan Nasional (BN) government of Mohamed Mahathir on similar charges.

Police dispersed jubilant opposition supporters outside the court using the excuse that three small bombs had exploded nearby.

I will come straight to the point.

We are rapidly coming to the end of the year and we still need to raise $59,536 to meet Green Left Weekly’s $250,000 Fighting Fund target for the year.

Our supporters have raised $190,424 so far this year, but we need an extraordinary effort in the rest of November and December to make our target.

GLW is a people-powered independent media project. We go against the stream in a society where public debate is dominated by the slick, self-serving corporate media.