The federal Coalition has used the alleged sexual assault of a young woman on Macquarie University to call for increased monitoring of asylum seekers.
Police have charged a Tamil asylum seeker with the attack, which allegedly took place when the man broke into the woman’s room and put a hand down her pyjama pants while she was asleep. He fled when she woke up and screamed.
Australia
It has been a colossal past year for women’s rights, with global and local attention flaring across a range of horrific individual tragedies and broader issues, including sexual assault and violence against women, the ongoing gendered disparity in income, and the debate on misogyny. In Melbourne, Jill Meagher’s abduction and murder lead to about 30,000 people rallying in Brunswick, while the Reclaim the Night march drew a crowd of 5000 people to Sydney Road in a huge public declaration that “Enough is enough”.
In year 10 at age 15, everyone was talking about the imminent Iraq war at school. I remember arguments in the playground about it. I got into [student anti-war group] Books Not Bombs when some year 12 students started advertising it around the school.
The 10,000 nurses and midwives involved in industrial action across Western Australia have been threatened with disciplinary action and deregistration by the state’s director general if they go ahead with a planned 24-hour strike on February 25.
The industrial dispute, which for the first time in 12 years has seen the closure of beds across the state’s public hospitals, is set to intensify in the coming week as the state government continues to ignore nurses’ demands on wages and conditions.
Geert Wilders called off his February 20 public meeting in Perth after the hotel where he was going to speak cancelled his booking.
Organisers of Wilders' tour tried to claim that protesters had intimidated the hotel and implied that Wilders' "free speech'' was threatened as people were "denied'' the chance to hear Wilders talk.
Wilders' most prominent supporter in the Australian parliament — disgraced Liberal senator Cory Bernardi — also tried to claim that there was "free speech double standard" involved.
In an attempt to avoid anti-racist protesters, the February 18 meeting to launch the Australian speaking tour of Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders, was, at the last moment, moved to a desolate, non-residential part of Somerton on Melbourne’s northern edge. More than 200 anti-racists, however, picketed Wilders’ meeting while another 100 protested in Melbourne CBD, where one of the speakers was Greens Senator Richard Di Natale.
The article below is an extract from Resistance’s Education zine, which was released on campuses this week.
***
In every state and territory, at many tertiary educational institutions, students are resisting a tide of cuts, commodification and privatisation.
Universities face staff, subject and department cuts, rising fees and costs, casualisation of staff, bigger classes, less class time and less face-to-face contact.
These are stills from film footage shot by Jill Hickson and John Reynolds for Actively Radical TV of the half a million-strong march on February 16, 2003 against the impending US-led invasion of Iraq.
These are stills (Part II) from film footage shot by Jill Hickson and John Reynolds for Actively Radical TV of the half a million-strong march on February 16, 2003 against the impending US-led invasion of Iraq.
[See Part I here.]
This is an extract from Towards a socialist Australia, produced by the Socialist Alliance and its affiliate, Resistance. Read the full text online at the Socialist Alliance website.
Why socialism?
The rise of resistance to dictatorships, corporate rule, military occupation and corrupt politics, which has occurred in the 21st century, brings new hope for humanity.
Greens Grayndler candidate Hall Greenland: 'Markets and corporations won't de-carbonise the economy'
Hall Greenland, a respected left-wing activist, writer and journalist in Sydney, is the Greens candidate for the inner-west Sydney seat of Grayndler. Greenland was a Leichhardt councillor for the Labor Party in the 1980s, and served a second term as an independent between 1999 and 2004.
He is president of the Friends of Callan Park, a community group which has waged a long struggle against the privatisation of a vital heritage area.
Greenland is also the author of Red Hot, a biography of one of Australia’s earliest Trotskyists, Nick Origlass.
Simon Butler was a 25-year-old activist who helped organise the mass mobilisations in Sydney in February and March 2003 against the invasion of Iraq. He was also a leader of the socialist youth group Resistance and the student anti-war movement Books Not Bombs, which Resistance initiated.
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