Nurses in Victoria are being threatened with an Alan Joyce-style lockout because they have campaigned for a modest 3.5% pay rise (just to keep up with the rising cost of living), superannuation and overtime improvements, and keeping patient-to-nurse ratios. Australia’s four big banks, meanwhile, have announced a combined annual profit of $24.4 billion, up 12% from $21.7 billion a year ago. This speaks volumes about the grossly distorted priorities in our society.

Socialist Alliance (SA) stallholders at today’s Newtown Festival were told today by a festival organiser that NSW Police had urged them to ban SA and Occupy Sydney from the festival. The SA has paid for and run a stall every year at the festival. But this year police threatened organisers — the Newtown Neighbourhood Centre — with a $16,000 bill if they did not carry out the ban, saying that the presence of SA and/or Occupy Sydney might incite trouble.

Supporters of Palestinian human rights gathered in Sydney on November 10 to protest the Australian government's silence on the arrest by Israeli authorities of Australian Michael Coleman, who took part in the recent Freedom Waves to Gaza attempt to sail humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Alan Kohler, the editor in chief of Business Spectator and the finance presenter on the ABC News, was blunt about who was to blame for the Europe debt crisis in his November 2 opinion piece on the ABC's The Drum. He said: “The debt crisis in Europe is the fault of bankers, yet the people are the ones who pay.

The ABC’s Q & A program on October 24 was the first to discuss the Occupy movement sweeping the world. Reportedly there are now occupations in 2200 cities. It revealed why the politicians that represent the richest 1% have no credibility any more.

Occupy Sydney protesters joined trade unionists in support of Qantas workers' fight for jobs and decent pay rise at the companies Annual General Meeting on October 28, 2011.

Simon Butler, co-editor of the independent media project Green Left Weekly and an activist in #OccupySydney speaks about the global Occupy movment and the climate change emergency.

Stuart Munckton, co-editor of Green Left Weekly/Green Left Online, speaks on a new flowering of independent media and activist journalism in the global movement of occupations against the tyranny of the world's richest 1%.

Many commentators and politicians have argued that the global movement of occupations that followed the Wall Street occupation against the rule of the richest 1% will not take root and grow in Australia, which has so far escaped the current global recession. Simon Butler, an activist in #OccupySydney and co-editor of www.greenleft.org, disagrees.

Socialist Alliance national convenor Peter Boyle gave the speech below at the recent Climate Change Social Change activist conference, held in Melbourne over September 30 to October 3.

Several prominent Australian human rights advocates have called for protests when Sri Lanka’s “war criminal” president, Mahinda Rajapaksa comes to Perth in late October to attend the Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting (CHOGM).