Socialist Alliance candidate for upper house in the coming NSW elections Bea Bleile expressed her continuing support for family of TJ Hickey, who are still fighting for justice following his death in 2004.
TJ Hickey, a young Aboriginal man, was killed during a police chase. He was impaled on a spiked fence in Phillip St, Waterloo.
In 2006, the NSW coroner exonerated the police involved from any wrongdoing. Yet a large amount of evidence was not included in the hearing. The family has called for the inquest to be reopened.
Australia
Across Australia, moves are afoot to pass bills to legalise same-sex marriage.
The Tasmanian Greens were first to introduce such a bill in 2008. Greens leader Nick McKim introduced the bill again in November.
The Tasmanian ALP was the first state Labor branch to announce its support for same-sex marriage, but this has not led it to support the Greens’ bill.
ABC news reported on November 7 that former Tasmanian Labor premier David Bartlett said: “I have personally no opposition to same-sex marriage in Australia, but I see it as a purview of the federal parliament.”
More than 400 people attended a February 7 forum that condemned the federal government’s intervention into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.
The forum was organised by Concerned Australians. It coincided with the launch of a public statement addressed “to the people of Australia” by seven Indigenous elders. The statement asked for support to “help to put an end to the nightmare that Northern Territory people are experiencing on a daily basis”.
More than 60 people attended a public meeting in Russell Vale, north of Wollongong, on February 3 to oppose a massive coalmine expansion in their neighbourhood.
The meeting was organised by Illawarra Residents for Responsible Mining (IRRM).
Gujurat NRE, owner of No. 1 Colliery in Russell Vale, wants to expand the colliery's current output by 7.5 times — from 400,000 tonnes a year to 3 million tonnes.
A new report by the North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) has slammed government-owned Forests NSW for what it calls “illegal and blatantly unsustainable logging” in public lands near Coffs Harbour.
Forests NSW’s timber has been accredited as ecological and sustainable by the government-appointed accreditation body Joint Accreditation System of Australia and New Zealand (JAS-ANZ) and the certification company NCS International.
For communities affected by Cyclone Yasi and the recent floods across Queensland, Western Australia, NSW, Victoria and Tasmania, it will be no comfort to hear that the Fair Work Act provides little protection for workers from unscrupulous employers.
Many bosses will choose to stand workers down without pay if their business is affected by these natural disasters.
At the height of the Queensland floods, state Workplace Rights Ombudsman Don Brown told ABC Online on January 21 that employers have the right to not pay workers for time off caused by the floods.
At a packed Leichhardt Town Hall candidates meeting on February 7, education minister Verity Firth all but conceded that the Labor state government would not be returned on March 26.
Firth said she was looking forward to rebuilding the ALP from the opposition benches. She was unconvincing.
Firth told the meeting she joined the ALP when she was a 15-year-old idealist. “Genuine lasting change is about more than slogans,” she said.
“When you’re in government you cannot just issue a press release or organise a protest rally ... because governing is far more complex.”
As momentous events in Egypt demonstrate, much of the world is calling to account an “old order”. These are exciting times for the possibilities of real change in the way our societies are run.
One of the catalysts of the “people power” we see on our TV screens is the extraordinary disclosure of secret information that tells us how wars begin and governments manipulate and deceive in our name.
In the tradition of courageous investigative journalism, WikiLeaks has blown the whistles that alert us to these injustices and lies, serving a basic democratic need.
The statement below was released by the Socialist Alliance on January 29.
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The Socialist Alliance applauds the courage and tenacity of the Tunisian people, whose protests for democracy and economic and social justice have ended the 23-year rule of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
The Tunisian revolution has inspired ordinary people across the Arab world. Protests have broken out in Algeria, Jordan, Yemen and — most dramatically — against the United States-backed dictatorship in Egypt.
New federal drug laws could make thousands of native and common garden plants illegal.
The proposed legislation will place common plants under schedule II of the drug code along with plants such as marijuana and opium poppies.
The most worrying aspect of the legislation is the sheer number of plant species that will be made illegal.
Many of the substances produced by the plants are already illegal to manufacture or consume. However, there is not any significant market for making drugs from these plants and they are not sold or produced by organised crime.
The following petition was initiated by the Sydney University Climate Action Collective and Yarra Climate Action Now.
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Our top scientists have been telling us for decades that our carbon pollution is creating ever-worsening natural disasters such as floods, droughts and bushfires. Despite this and the record high ocean temperatures which contributed to our recent heavy rain, our state and federal governments have been reluctant to link climate change to the recent floods.
Wharfies employed by stevedoring company Patrick at four different ports across Australia took strike action in the last week of January in pursuit of a new enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA).
It was the most significant industrial action on the wharves since the 1998 Patrick lockout.
In recent ballots organised by Fairwork Australia, workers at the strike-affected ports voted (by margins of 94% to 100%) to take a range of different forms of industrial action to press their claim.
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