The NSW Coalition government’s 2019 budget, handed down by Treasurer Dominic Perrottet on June 18, proposes to slash almost 3000 public service jobs over the next four years to fund its modest election promises.
The government has also vowed to continue its effective wage freeze by maintaining its 2.5% cap on public service wage rises.
Despite all the Coalition rhetoric about “balancing the budget”, the budget predicts government debt will rise to almost $39 billion over the next four years.
The Australian Electoral Commission’s final tally for the NSW Senate vote in the May 18 federal election shows the Socialist Alliance (SA) winning 6058 first preference vote. This is 12.5% higher than its 2016 tally (5385) and more than double its 2013 vote (2728).
Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) campaign coordinator Pas Forgione outlined why a campaign to “Raise the rate” of the Newstart unemployment benefit is desperately needed, at a June 15 community forum in Sydney’s west.
Last November, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that Australia will take its engagement with the region “to a new level” through a “new package of security, economic, diplomatic and people-to-people initiatives” in the region.
A month later, the Morrison government established a new Office of the Pacific within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to support “deepening engagement” with the region.
Make Rojava Green Again is an ecological campaign comprising activists from around the world, inspired by the ecological, feminist, multi-ethnic and democratic revolution taking place in Rojava in Northern Syria.
Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, recently passed a resolution equating BDS, which calls for economic and cultural sanctions against Israel over its apartheid-like policies towards Palestinians, with anti-Semitism.
Thousands took to the streets in towns and cities around Haiti on June 9 to demand President Jovenel Moïse’s resignation and the prosecution of those responsible for looting about US$2 billion from the government’s Petrocaribe Fund, writes Haiti Liberté's Kim Ives.
In order to hold onto the Mayoral position in Barcelona's beacon of progressive municipalism, has Ada Colau made a deal with the devil? Dick Nichols unpicks the recent council election.
Martin Empson takes a look at a compelling first-hand study that shows that fishing is a deadly occupation because capitalism forces workers to take terrible risks to survive.
Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s decision to oppose impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump is motivated by fear of the rise of a leftist pole within or from outside the Democratic Party, writes Steve Ellner.
In an ongoing and under-publicised tragedy, indigenous peoples around the world routinely have their rights violated in the name of the global war on drugs.
Neither the United States nor Iran really wants war, we are told, because the reality of such a conflict is too horrific to contemplate. But the Gulf tanker crisis and the US response shows that we are alarmingly close to open hostilities.
It is true that there are voices in the US defence establishment calling for restraint. It appears to be the case, too, that the Iranian government is operating on the assumption that the US does not want a war. But there are several reasons why such assumptions are not a sound basis for judgement.