John Tognolini

  • Vale Hal Alexander, socialist and working class militant 1924-2014

    Harold John (Hal) Alexander passed away on December 19 in Sydney. He was born on April 9, 1924 and was for many years an electrician, mostly in heavy industry. He joined the then-illegal Communist Party in 1941, at the age of 17, and was a member until its dissolution in 1991. He was an organiser from 1954 to 1967 in Sydney, then Adelaide. He suffered many arrests for his political activities and served three jail terms, two involving hunger strikes. He worked and lived with the Arrente people of Central Australia on and off from 1985.

  • Vale Neville ‘Killer’ Kane: 1941-2012

    Picture this scene — late April 1986, a group of a dozen builders labourers on a cold Melbourne morning. The time is about 7.30am. They were picketing a building site where they’d been sacked for refusing to resign from their union, the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF), which had recently been “deregistered” — a nice term for outlawed under Bob Hawke’s ALP federal government. The ALP premiers of New South Wales and Victoria, Neville Wran and John Cain, joined Hawke’s drive to outlaw the BLF.

  • Human cost of concrete and steel

    Framework of Flesh: Builders' Labourers battle for health & Safety By Humphrey McQueen Ginninderra Press, 2009 337 pages, $30 (pb) Available from www.resistancebooks.com Humphrey McQueen's Framework of Flesh takes up a 1920s challenge from a militant builders labourer, Charlie Sullivan:

  • Bernie Banton, working-class fighter

    Bernie Banton, the widely-recognised face of the legal and political campaign to achieve compensation for the many sufferers of asbestos-related conditions, which they contracted after working for the James Hardie company, died on November 27, at the age of 61.

  • NSW teachers vote for 48-hour strike

    SYDNEY — At 140 stop-work meetings across NSW on December 2, members of the NSW Teachers Federation voted by a margin of 98% for stepped-up industrial action in support of their salaries campaign, including a 48-hour strike on

  • Questions over NSW police inquiry

    SYDNEY — Police corruption has long been a central theme in New South Wales. Ian Temby's last report, on Operation Milloo for the Independent Committee Against Corruption, delivered in February, revealed police involvement in

  • Unaccountable police and Aborigines

    "Objectivity" and "balance" are terms used by many journalists to cop out of stating the obvious: that Aboriginal people in Australia are the victims of institutionalised racism from police and prison officers, and that these

  • New issue of CEFTAA magazine

    New issue of CEFTAA magazineFramed is the quarterly magazine of the Campaign Exposing Frame-ups and Targeting Abuses of Authority. It was born during the fight against the frame-up of Tim Anderson. Issue 22 takes the