What would Australia look like if Tony Abbott became the next prime minister?
The Liberal leader is an outspoken climate denier, a hardliner on locking out refugees, determined to crack down on union and workers’ rights and wants to extend racist and draconian attacks on Aboriginal rights.
Yet polls have consistently shown Abbott and the Coalition far ahead of the Julia Gillard Labor government, whose pro-business policies and internal scandals have made it deeply unpopular.
Australia
Julian Assange lost his Appeal against the UK Supreme Court on May 30th 2012. This means he could soon be extradited to Sweden and from there could be immediately flown to the United States under a process called "temporary surrender" to face trumped up charges of espionage and conspiracy.
The rhetoric of homophobia is changing in our society. Those on the conservative side of the debate no longer make any mention of the Bible, morality or mental health. Instead, they claim they are motivated by love to oppress gay people.
Recently, I sat in the NSW legislative council (in which Reverend Fred Nile, MLC, is the honorary chaplain of the house) and watched the debate on marriage equality.
Anger and concern is spreading as people become aware of the scale of the cuts to the TAFE sector. The Baillieu government said it would slash $300 million from the TAFE sector in Victoria.
At a public meeting titled “TAFE Cuts, Education and the Capitalist Crisis”, the president of the National Tertiary Education Union’s University of Ballarat branch, Jeremy Smith said 57 courses were being totally axed at Ballarat TAFE.
Feminists caused a stir at the University of Western Australia (UWA) when posters and stickers appeared around the campus on May 31. Declaring “rape jokes are hate speech”, the posters and stickers were hard to miss. A sign with the same message appeared on a statue in the Swan River close to the campus.
The same day, the main social club on campus was to hold a party to “celebrate and commemorate the contemporary culture of our fair university/city (As seen on PerthNow)”.
Guillaume Legault, a leading member of Quebec’s CLASSE student organisation, will join this year's Resistance national conference “A Time of Revolution” over July 20-22 in Adelaide.
CLASSE — the Broad Coalition of the Association for Student Union Solidarity — is the most radical student association leading the student strike in Quebec against rising tuition fees. Hundreds of thousands of students and supporters have taken part in the strike and daily protests.
On June 2 Justin Sane and Chris #2 from Anti-Flag dropped in to Martin Place to show their support and performed a few songs for Occupy Sydney.
Passersby were handed leaflets supporting striking Central Queensland coal mineworkers at a picket of the BHP-Billiton Brisbane office on June 1. The leaflet said the picket was being held “to show our solidarity with the striking coalminers in Central Queensland over their dispute with BMA company [BHP-Mitsubishi Alliance] concerning mine safety. This is a crucial fight for working rights and conditions, important for all Australian unionists right now.”
Despite bleak weather, about 50 people took part in a May 31 protest to call on the Australian government to “bring Julian Assange home”. The protest took part the day after the British supreme court ruled that Assange, WikiLeaks’ editor-in-chief, had to be extradited to Sweden.
Rally chairperson Chris Jenkins said the protest was important because “Sweden has not ruled out handing Julian Assange over to the US” where he faces danger due to a sealed indictment with unspecified allegations.
Students from the only remaining full-time Auslan course in Victoria have been learning to sign the words “protest rally”, and “Parliament House”, Lana Schwartz told a 250-strong rally to save the course on May 30.
Auslan is the sign language used by the deaf community, and Schwartz is a student in the Auslan diploma offered by Kangan Batman TAFE in Melbourne. But the TAFE announced the course would be axed at the end of the year.
Private-detention centre operator Serco and the department of immigration have taken steadily more aggressive action to prevent refugees in detention from speaking out about their conditions. They have done this by moving to restrict and curtail visits to detainees, and have banned several individuals.
How outrageous is this story?
Just days after International Monetary Fund boss Christine Lagarde lectured Greek people to pay their taxes or not expect any sympathy from the rest of the world, the British Guardian revealed that her salary of US$467,940 a year, plus US$83,760 in additional allowances, is tax-free. What a bloody hypocrite.
Like top United Nations officials and the Queen of England, the IMF chief enjoys tax-free status.
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