Phil Bradley, the first Greens councillor elected to Parramatta Council, knows the next period will be a testing time.
Pip Hinman
A 22-year-old Aboriginal man has died in custody after being found unconscious in his cell at the Tamworth Correctional Centre on September 20. He was taken to hospital and died two days later.
Even before an investigation has been undertaken, the police and some media have said his death is not “suspicious” — a deliberate attempt to pass judgement that his death was a suicide.
But his family, who rallied outside Tamworth Correctional Centre on September 24 say he had no reason to self-harm.
The nationwide debate over equal marriage rights has brought a lot more people into contact with Green Left Weekly.
Circulation of this “little paper with a big heart”, as a supporter once described us, is growing as more people look to alternative media sources for their information.
GLW is now in its 26th year of production — no mean feat for a not-for-profit newspaper in the most media monopolised country in the world.
In front of a packed public gallery, Labor sided with the Liberals to award the Inner West Council mayorship and deputy mayorship to themselves on September 21.
Labor’s Darcy Byrne received the support of two Liberals and conservative independent Victor Macri for mayor, with Liberal councillor Julie Passas elected as deputy.
Byrne and Passas narrowly defeated anti-WestConnex independent Pauline Lockie and the Greens’ Colin Hesse, who stood for mayor and deputy, respectively, in an 8—7 vote.
The former NSW roads minister Duncan Gay has joined the list of recently resigned NSW MPs who have taken lucrative jobs with corporations associated with their former portfolio.
Gay, a former National Party leader, left parliament at the end of July. A parliamentary ethics committee has only just become aware that he is working as an advisor with MU Group — a company bidding for, and winning, NSW government transport contracts.
Coalition finance minister Mathias Cormann told an admiring audience at the conservative Sydney Institute on August 23 that Labor leader Bill Shorten was “channelling” Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.
If only...
Gamilaraay elder Auntie Bowie Hickey and daughter Vanessa Hickey expressed their deep gratitude to those protesting outside a gas industry forum on August 3.
The Wilderness Society called the protest to highlight the widespread opposition to Santos’ Narrabri gas project in the Pilliga Forest.
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.
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.
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