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Rally for refugee rights, Sydney, October 15.

As the federal Labor government was forced to drop its maligned “Malaysia solution” and process all refugees arriving by boat in Australia, there was the hint that its inhumane detention of thousands of refugees would also be questioned.

Occupy Sydney on October 15th 2011.

Occupy Melbourne general assembly

Live blog of Occupy Sydney and Occupy Melbourne protests.

Former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr says he is excited by the Occupy Wall Street protests against US corporations, which deserve “a roughing up … after the abuses that blighted the lives of ordinary families”. Yet he has decided the protest movement has no future.
Australian Taxation Office management has announced it will put a revised draft enterprise agreement up for a staff vote between November 9 and 15. The new version is little different from management’s original proposal, which was rejected by staff by a margin of 59% to 41% in June. The total pay rise being offered is still 9% over three years, which is less than the expected rate of inflation.
The Queensland government lifted a ban on fishing in and around Gladstone Harbour on October 6, but controversy over diseased fish goes on. Writing in the October 19 Courier Mail, environment reporter Bryan Williams said: “The mystery of the Gladstone fish disease outbreak continues, with scientists focusing on a parasitic flatworm and about 300 tonnes of Barramundi that spilled into the Boyne River last summer from Awoonga Dam.
Occupy Melbourne, City Square, October 15.

Federal Greens MP for Melbourne has come out against the October 20 decision to send riot police to evict peaceful protesters from the occupy Melbourne site in City Square.

John Bellamy Foster address Occupy Eugene

John Bellamy Foster is renowned Marxist economist and ecologist, and an editor of Monthly Review. He was a featured guest speaker at the World at a Crossroads: Climate Change-Social Change conference, which Green Left Weekly co-organised in Melbourne over September 30-October 3.

More corporate managers are psychopaths than the general population, a detailed research project has discovered. The University of British Columbia study “Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk”, published in Behavioural Sciences and the Law, March/April 2010, looked at professionals who had been spotted as potential management material, the people thought to have the skills that could get them to senior positions.
More than 600 people rallied and marched in Brisbane’s CBD on October 16, as part of a national day of action to “Defend our water from coal and coal seam gas”. The rally in Queens Park was sponsored by the Lock and Gate Alliance and Defend Our Water Queensland. Lock the Gate Alliance spokesperson Drew Hutton told the rally: “We live in the driest country on earth. To allow the mining industry to pollute our water and destroy our best farming land is a disgrace. “Why is the Labor government allowing the mining companies to ruin our state? And the Liberal-National Party are no better.”
3000 people marched across the Sea Cliff Bridge, Coalcliff, NSW, on October 16.

More than 3000 people walked across the iconic Sea Cliff Bridge today in opposition to coal seam gas (CSG) mining. Simultaneously, abseilers lowered a banner from the escarpment that said: "This community has spoken. Stop CSG". Lord Mayor Gordon Bradbery, and councillors George Takacs, Lee Colacino, Bede Crasnich, Vicki Curran, Jill Merrin and Greg Petty attended the walk.

The huge number of transnational capitalist firms straddling the planet are effectively controlled by a very small group of centrally important players, says a ground-breaking survey conducted by Swiss researchers. Deploying statistical methods normally used in physics, Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder and Stefano Battiston of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, data-mined information held by business intelligence firm Bureau van Dijk. The data, which included company ownership structures, allowed a new insight into the relationships between 43,060 corporations.