Peter Boyle

For many months now, major party politicians and the big business media have sung paeans to the Lucky Country’s luckiest mining bonanza yet, riding the coat-tails of the rapid industrialisation of China and India. Federal treasurer Wayne Swan told the National Press Club on March 5: “Asia’s enormous appetite for our mineral commodities drives an investment pipeline in the resources sector worth $456 billion.
The latest State of the Climate report by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO was launched at a weather monitoring station on remote Cape Grim in Tasmania. The location was an apt choice for a report that has very bad news about Australia's continuing failure to respond adequately to the climate change crisis.

The 2012 International Women's Day (IWD) march in Sydney, Australia, took place on March 10. Protesters marched from Town Hall to First Fleet Park near Circular Quay, where they held a IWD picnic.

There is a growing disconnect between the official rosy picture of the Australian economy and mounting public anxiety about job insecurity. The latest official unemployment rate (January 2012) was steady at 5.2% and Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson insists there is no reason to worry. Australians, he said, should shake off their misplaced “boom with gloom” attitude.

“Something is badly amiss when Queensland bushies embrace Green Left Weekly, and the opposite ends of the political fringe, the Greens and Bob Katter’s Australian Party, find a common cause,” began a February 22 editorial in Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian, the only national daily newspaper in this country.
“If changing the f****** leader would change f****** government policy to support the f****** 99% instead of the f****** 1% then we’d be f****** interested in this f****** soap opera!” This tongue-in-cheek Facebook status that I posted on February 21 ended up sparking a bit of political discussion. It expressed what a lot of ordinary people were thinking as round two of Kevin Rudd versus Julia Gillard came to a head.
A string of banks, airlines, car manufacturers and aluminium smelters — all big corporations that have profited for years while extorting billions of dollars in public subsidies — have spat in the face of our society. They have begun huge sackings of workers, even though Australia supposedly escaped the worst of capitalism’s global economic crisis. The big banks have posted record profits, but they refuse to pass on interest rate cuts to families struggling to keep up with huge home mortgages.
By now we all know that the rich get richer under capitalism. But many are astounded at the incredible pace this takes place. Last week it was reported that Australian billionaire James Packer celebrated a 560% increase in his casino investment in Macau. Great reward for making totally unproductive, indeed socially and morally destructive, investments.
Rupert Murdoch's flagship newspaper, The Australian, has been on a campaign to destroy the Greens because the party represents a big electoral break from the two-parties-for-capitalism system that has dominated politics in this country for more than a century. In the past two weeks, this campaign has been hyped into McCarthyite Cold War hysteria.

Pat Eatock, a veteran of the 1972 Aboriginal Tent Embassy, was recently splashed all over the news holding the Prime Minister's shoe. The shoe was lost when Julia Gillard was clumsily evacuated with opposition leader Tony Abbott by her panicked security detail from a function just 100 metres from the 40th anniversary gathering at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. The gathering took place next to the Old Parliament House in Canberra on January 26.

The eighth national conference of the Socialist Alliance in Australia decided to take a draft document titled “Towards a socialist Australia” through a nationwide public discussion and consultation process to promote a wide discussion about socialism in the 21st century.

The real story of the powerful march celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy was ignored by the mainstream media in favour of misleading and charged accounts of a confrontation of Australia's racist opposition leader Tony Abbott and PM Julia Gillard by protesters later in the day.