The near-continuous introduction, change and reversal of several federal government policies on asylum seekers arriving by boat have had a severely damaging effect on refugees held in the Northern Immigration Detention Centre in Darwin.
An Iranian man who arrived on Christmas Island just after the government announced it would “swap” 800 asylum seekers in Australia for 4000 refugees from Malaysia, said he was told every day he would be deported. “It was the worst two months of my life.”
Australia
About 120 refugee rights activists from multiple Australian cities gathered outside the Northern Territory’s parliament house in Darwin today to protest against mandatory detention and the three detention centres located around the region.
The event kicked off protests that are taking place at the detention facilities over the Easter long weekend for the annual refugee convergence. Each year refugee activists gather at a place in Australia where refugees are held in remote or difficult-to-reach location.
1500 Sydney University students and staff rallied on April 4 to protest against management's move to sack 360 staff. Protesters marched through the university, culminating in 100 students occupying the Arts administration building in opposition to the attacks.
Far from taking the closure of the Heinz tomato factory sitting down, workers and community members from the 150-strong rural Victorian town of Girgarre are getting organised.
Behind the hype of Australia’s mining boom and “economic stability” lies the very real crisis affecting rural Australia.
The Queensland ALP “snatched disaster from the jaws of defeat,” socialist activist Gary MacLennan told a public forum at the Activist Centre here on April 3. The forum, sponsored by Green Left Weekly, discussed the Liberal National Party’s (LNP) rise to power in Queensland, the crisis in the ALP and what this meant for the labour movement.
MacLennan said: “When the Queensland people said no to the [Anna] Bligh Labor government, they were not saying yes to an LNP government.
The Safe Food Foundation (SFF) released the statement below on April 3.
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Slater & Gordon Solicitors today lodged a claim in the WA Supreme Court on behalf of an organic farmer seeking to recover loss and damage allegedly caused by a genetically modified canola farmer neighbour. Steve Marsh, an organic farmer from Kojonup, Western Australia, suffered contamination by genetically modified (GM) material on his farm in late 2010 leading to the loss of his organic certification and loss of income.
Street theatre from the "Adelaide March 4 Survival" on March 31. The protest was organised by CLEAN (the Climate Emergency Action Network). The action connected the dots between extreme weather and climate change, and demanding solar thermal for Port Augusta.
About 100 teachers, parents and concerned community members rallied outside NSW parliament on March 29 to protest against the relocation of Gosford Public Schools to the grounds of Henry Kendall High School.
Speakers at the rally included Unions NSW secretary Mark Lennon, NSW Teachers Federation president Maurie Mulheron, NSWTF officer Debbie Westacott, NSW Greens Legislative Council member John Kaye as well as staff and parents from Gosford Public School.
“I was a people smuggler,” said Hungarian refugee and refugee rights activist Peter Farago to a public meeting of about 70 people in Melbourne on March 27.
The public meeting, titled “Smuggled to Freedom: behind the anti-people smuggling rhetoric”, was organised by the Refugee Action Collective Victoria to expose the rhetoric behind the government’s anti-people smuggling campaign.
Rallies were held in Sydney and Melbourne on March 30 in solidarity with the Global March to Jerusalem that will take place on the historic Palestine Land Day 2012. This marks the events of March 1976, after the Israeli authorities confiscated thousands of dunums of private and public land in majority Palestinian areas.
The Cocos (Keeling) Islands is a tiny group of coral atolls in the Indian Ocean 2800 kilometres north-west of Perth and 900 kilometres from Java. It has a population of about 600.
These islands were nominally a British territory between 1858 and 1955, when they were transferred by a British act of parliament to Australia. Yet for the next 17 years, the Australian government allowed the islands to operate as a private fiefdom of the Clunies-Ross family — just as the British had for 100 years before then.
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