On May 30, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was the first of the “coalition of the willing” to declare he would support US President Donald Trump’s request for more occupying troops in Afghanistan. Sydney Stop the War Coalition issued this statement which is abridged below.
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Sydney Stop the War Coalition opposes the Turnbull Coalition government’s decision to take up US President Donald Trump’s request and send more Australian troops to the quagmire in Afghanistan.
The Australian Refugee Action Network (ARAN) held its inaugural conference on May 20-21 at the Australian National University in Canberra. It brought together more than 150 activists and representatives of 48 refugee advocacy and activist groups from around the country.
Participants included a large number of activists from Rural Australians for Refugees (RAR) groups. RAR held its own national meeting over the conference, and elected a new leadership. The proposal to form ARAN came out of discussion at last year’s RAR conference.
French economist Thomas Piketty argued in his bestselling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century that capitalism arose from feudalism and is in many ways reverting to it.
Filipino police and military forces in the small city of Marawi on the island of Mindanao attempted to arrest Isnilon Hapilon, a leader of the Abu Sayyaf criminal gang, on May 23. By the end of the day, President Rodrigo Duterte’s government had declared martial law throughout the island for 60 days and launched a military assault.
By June 2, that ongoing assault, including air strikes, had killed at least 160 people and displaced hundreds of thousands.
This dramatic escalation represents the further slide of Duterte’s administration towards authoritarian rule and a betrayal of his election campaign promise to pursue a negotiated end to Mindanao’s multiple insurgencies.
In March last year, I ended an 18-month relationship that had become a physical and emotional torment. Although more than a year has passed since then, the harsh reality is that I — like so many other women — have been harassed my whole life simply because I was born female.
In Year 5, I was a topic of conversation among my male classmates because I was the first girl in class to start wearing a training bra. They would snap my bra straps every chance they got.
Australia's four big banks plus AMP are ripping off the country's workers with huge fees charged on their superannuation investments, a recent study has revealed.
New research carried out by Rainmaker for Industry Super Australia, a mainly union-backed body, shows that the retail super funds, largely operated by the big banks, absorb about half of all fees charged in the superannuation system, despite holding only 29% of retirement savings.
What is it with ex-state premiers and the finance industry?
First, Anna Bligh took on the leadership of the Australian Bankers Association (ABA), then Mike Baird moved to NAB in a senior executive role, and now Nathan Rees has become the national assistant secretary of the Finance Sector Union.
With less than two weeks until the June 8 general elections, a song about Tory leader Theresa May reached the Top 10 in the download chart. Yet the official chart shows on radio stations Capital FM and Heart have refused to play it.
Performed by Captain Ska, “Liar, Liar GE2017” can be downloaded for £1 or less, with proceeds split between food banks and campaign group the People’s Assembly Against Austerity.
A new influenza pandemic is quite possible, according to a study by researchers at the University of NSW’s School of Public Health. The study notes that 19 different influenza strains have affected humans in the last 100 years, but the speed with which new strains have emerged has increased over the past 15 years. There have been seven new strains in the past five years alone.
As security forces repressed anti-government protests in the capital, a military police operation to break up a protest camp left 10 civilians dead, with witnesses claiming they were killed execution-style.
None of this made it into the international media however, because it happened in Brazil, not Venezuela.
The NSW Country Women’s Association passed a motion at its state conference on May 27 calling for a halt to any further “unconventional gas exploration” in NSW — a ban on coal seam gas. The motion was put by the Maules Creek branch.
It flies in the face of last week’s announcement by NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro that he wanted an expansion of the CSG industry, although not on the Liverpool Plains.
Less than a year after being installed in power via a constitutional coup, the government of Brazilian President Michel Temer is teetering on the brink of collapse.
Plagued by corruption scandals – the same pretext used by the right-wing controlled judiciary and parliament to topple centre-left president Dilma Rousseff – and popularity figures in the single digits, the Temer regime is now facing a growing revolt from below demanding “direct elections now!”