Australia

  • Reclaim the Night protest returns to Adelaide

    About 350 women took to the streets of Adelaide on October 26 as part of a Reclaim the Night protest. No march was held last year, so it was inspiring to see women of all ages marching through the central business and nightclub districts of Adelaide chanting, “whatever we wear, wherever we go — yes means yes, no means no”, and “women united will never be defeated”. The event was a women’s only space. Male supporters were encouraged to show support from the footpath along the march route.

  • Sydney University looks to close Koori Centre for Aboriginal students

    The University of Sydney ended last year with a $117 million surplus, but is moving close it's Koori Centre. The Koori Centre has supported Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students at the university since 1989. It also coordinates the teaching of Indigenous Studies and provides a library, comfortable meeting space and computers. The Centre provides support staff whose role was to help Aboriginal students through their degree. Instead of maintaining and expanding the Centre, student says the university is seeking to close it.

  • Protesters say no to Campbell ‘Nuke-man’

    More than 50 people came out to Brisbane’s Executive Building on the morning of October 29 in a fiery protest against Premier Campbell Newman’s recent decision to allow uranium mining in Queensland. Under the banner of Queensland Nuclear Free Alliance, the protest called for a complete ban on uranium mining in the state.

  • Letter from refugees: 'We prefer to die instead of living in Nauru'

    The statement below was issued by asylum seekers on Nauru following their protest on the afternoon of October 29. Republished from the Refugee Action Coalition Sydney. * * * ASYLUM SEEKERS IN NAURU TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN We heard several times from different authorities that the sending of us [to Nauru] is an argument of giving lessons to those who have intention of coming to Australia through the sea by people smugglers.

  • Stop violence against women: Raise women's status

    Globally, millions of women experience violence — whether in the form of intimate partner violence, rape and sexual coercion, stalking, trafficking, forced prostitution, exploitation of labour, or other violations of women's bodies and psyches. The high prevalence of violence against women both reflects and reinforces women's lower status in society. To end the violence against women, we need to confront both the violence directly and the structural causes of women's lower standing that makes women vulnerable to the violence.

  • Power generators feel the heat from renewables

    Australia’s big electricity generators are feeling the squeeze of electricity demand falling in recent years and growing competition from renewable energy. This year, some environmentalists criticised the federal government for scrapping the “contracts for closure” negotiations, which would have made the federal government compensate operators to close up to 2000 megawatts of coal-fired power stations. However, more than 2000 megawatts of coal power plant has now been closed or “mothballed” across the country without paying the contracts for closure.

  • Billionaires' riches grow as poor lose out

    We've been told opportunity, prosperity and more freedoms came to Australia under the banner of capitalism and the “free-market” in the 1980s and 90s after the economic slump of two recessions. But when neoliberal ideals and rhetoric are set aside, a grim picture of the great, and ever growing, divide between the rich and poor in Australia emerges yet again. Between 1920 and 1980, inequality in Australia was shrinking, until a perceived sense of national stagnation took hold and the Hawke-Keating Labor government made the leap into the global free market.