Australia

  • Students take action on housing crisis

    On August 20, activists from the Student Housing Action Collective (SHAC) at Melbourne University occupied four terrace houses in Faraday St, Carlton. The houses are owned by Melbourne University and were used as student counselling offices until 2005.

  • Privatisation is theft: no energy sell-off!

    The Socialist Alliance has condemned NSW Premier Morris Iemma’s latest bid to rush through enabling legislation to sell off the state’s energy retailers and generators.

  • Habib to appeal conviction

    On August 18, former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib was fined $400 in the Ryde Local Court for offensive language and behaviour towards police. The ruling will be appealed in the Parramatta District Court on September 11.

  • AMCOR workers campaign for a new agreement

    PERTH — Workers at the AMCOR factory in the suburb of Canningvale protested on August 19 to support their campaign for wage rises and a new enterprise agreement. The plant, which manufactures steel cans, had been assessed as one of the most productive in the world but now faces decline because of management intransigence, workers told Green Left Weekly outside the factory gates.

  • GM moratorium may be extended

    PERTH — With a state election set for September 6, the WA Labor government last week pledged a four-year extension of the current moratorium on GM (genetically modified) crops and a limit on GM canola trials to 10 hectares.

  • A younger, greener council for Newcastle

    When you see the line-up of candidates running for Newcastle council in the September 13 elections, you notice the average demographic is seriously out of whack with that of the region.

  • Issy Wyner, 1916-2008

    When a teacher at Fort Street High School recommended that students read the economist John Maynard Keynes, the school boy Isadore Wyner suggested Karl Marx. Young Issy was reprimanded. This did not stop him from engaging with the world for another eight decades.

  • NSW community housing tenants pay for cuts

    Low-income tenants in community housing will face greater hardship following a recent NSW government policy decision that means tenants will lose their rent assistance.

  • TAFE teachers strike against pay rip-off

    Two thousand striking Technical and Further Education (TAFE) teachers gathered at Melbourne’s Atheneum Theatre on August 20 to demand better pay and conditions. The last time Victorian TAFE teachers went on strike was under Jeff Kennett’s Coalition state government 13 years ago.

  • Public servants reject below-inflation pay offer

    In a move eerily reminiscent of the lousy pay offers this year to NSW and Victorian public sector workers, the Queensland Labor government has offered staff at the Department of Main Roads a 3.25% per year increase for the three years of their current enterprise agreement. The offer is significantly below the official inflation rate in Brisbane of 5.1%, the highest of any capital city in Australia.