The largest ever Australia-US joint military exercises have just finished. Talisman Sabre 2017, the seventh of these expensive biennial war games, wound up in Brisbane on July 26 on the USS Ronald Reagan — a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier with capacity for 5000 troops and 200 fighter jets.
Pip Hinman
New South Wales housing minister Anthony Roberts told a 600-strong meeting on July 12 that the main solution to Sydney’s housing affordability crisis was to create more supply. He derided those arguing for affordable rental housing targets as “simplistic”.
The Sydney Alliance’s second “housing assembly” included Catholic Archbishop Anthony Fisher, Churches Housing executive officer Magnus Linder, Greater Sydney Commission CEO Sarah Hill and several people who presented their personal experience of housing stress.
Life is about to get a lot tougher for 700,000 workers and their dependents when the penalty rate cuts hit on July 1. It is also the day politicians will get a 2% pay rise.
Full and part-time workers in the retail, fast food, hospitality and pharmacy industries are the first to be hit. The ACTU calculated that casuals in the pharmacy industry will face an annual cut of up to $6000 as the result of a February ruling by the misnamed Fair Work Commission.
For Raymond “Bubbly” Weatherall, a Gamilaraay man from the Gunu Gunu and Biridja clans, the outcomes of the Uluru meeting at the end of May have not changed his mind about the tokenism of Constitutional Recognition.
“Throughout the campaign, as well as at the Uluru meeting, no grassroots voices had really been listened to or given proper weight in the discussion”, he told Green Left Weekly.
“The Uluru statement was just another government voice through the mouths of Black people — Megan Davis, Pat Anderson and Noel Pearson.”
NSW Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon is again the target of a very public attack. This time it is not being led by the Murdoch press but by the Greens federal parliamentary caucus. Former Greens leader Bob Brown has also stepped in and repeated his demand she step down.
Attacking Rhiannon for sticking to her principles has become a pastime for the right-wing of the Greens.
After the recent spate of murders in Manchester, London and Melbourne people are increasingly asking what the past 20 years of the “war on terror” has done besides making the world a more dangerous, divided and fearful place.
NSW Coalition MPs voted down a bill, 35 to 45, on May 11, that mandated registered nurses in residential aged care facilities. Labor, the Greens, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, as well as Independents Alex Greenwich and Greg Piper supported the bill.
The NSW Nurses and Midwives Association’s Brett Holmes said the government’s decision was “shameful” because not having skilled nurses in nursing homes would mean that the quality of care provided to some of the state’s most vulnerable would deteriorate.
It is rare to see such a powerful film as Brendan Shoebridge’s The Bentley Effect, which focuses on the successful struggle by Northern Rivers communities to save their land and water from the coal seam gas juggernaut at Bentley, near Lismore, in New South Wales.
The power of community is often talked about, but this film shows how it actually happened, in a powerful tale of political awakening among several generations.
It is rare to see such a powerful film as Brendan Shoebridge’s The Bentley Effect, which focuses on the successful struggle by Northern Rivers communities to save their land and water from the coal seam gas juggernaut at Bentley, near Lismore, NSW.
The power of community is often talked about, but this film shows how it actually happened, in a powerful tale of political awakening among several generations.
More than 7000 submissions were presented to the NSW Department of Planning after a lively march through Sydney’s CBD to protest against Santos coal seam gas mining that threatens the Pilliga Forest and goes against the wishes of the Gamilaraay traditional custodians of the land.
Narrabri gasfield threatens two precious water resources: the Great Artesian Basin and the Murray-Darling Basin.
The area of the Great Artesian Basin with the highest recharge rates is almost entirely contained within the Pilliga Forest.
Women have again been let down by the majority of MPs in the NSW Legislative Council who voted down a Greens’ bill to decriminalise abortion on May 11.
The vote was 25 against and 14 in favour of Dr Mehreen Faruqi’s private members’ bill and it was greeted with cries of "shame" from the packed public gallery.
The decades’ long campaign to take abortion out of the NSW Crimes Act is coming to a head. A Greens bill to do this and enact safe zones around abortion clinics will go to the NSW Parliament on May 11.
- Previous page
- Page 31
- Next page