When the Murdoch-owned Australian starts attacking students who took to the streets on March 27 as part of the National Union of Students’ (NUS) protest for free education, it is evidence that student activism makes conservatives very nervous.
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Socialist councillor Sam Wainwright has vowed to run a fierce campaign for the seat of Fremantle aimed at winning public support for confiscating the wealth of the mining billionaires and the big banks.
“The mining boom reveals starkly the manifest inequality of capitalism in Australia today,” Wainwright told Green Left Weekly.
“On the one hand, we have Gina Rinehart — who has become the richest person in Australia — and on the other hand we have homeless people on the streets of Fremantle.
For anyone who knows the science, it’s settled — fossil fuels need to be banished fast from our energy mix. But how do we achieve it? Can we rely on renewable sources such as wind and solar? Or must humanity turn to nuclear power?
That’s a controversy that has bubbled away for years among people who all accept the dangers of global warming. Now, from the energy sector in China, there’s hard new evidence bearing on this debate.
The experience in China shows that as a way of quickly replacing greenhouse-polluting fuels, renewable energy wins against nuclear, hands down.
Twelve years ago, with the support of the United Nations, world leaders agreed to work together to achieve universal education, promote gender equality and halve extreme poverty by 2015.
Known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the initiative has been described as the “most successful global anti-poverty push in history”.
But how much have the goals really achieved? Five years after they were adopted, their achievements were discussed at the World Social Forum held in Brazil in 2005.
“The future is uncertain for more than 400 Shell employees,” ABC.net.au said on April 4, “after the company announced it is selling its refinery in Geelong in Victoria.”
Shell's Clyde refinery in NSW and Caltex's Lytton refinery in Queensland are both closing, at a cost of 1080 jobs.
The annual Western Sydney fundraising dinner was held on March 23. In a great start to the year, organisers filled Granville Town Hall and raised more than $1600 for the Green Left Weekly fighting fund.
On March 9th, 2013, around 400 people gathered in Melbourne to say no to violence against women.
It seems that everyone in Australia can now agree that a class war has erupted. Former Labor Party leader Simon Crean, recently sacked by Prime Minister Julia Gillard said: “The Labor Party has always operated most effectively when it has been inclusive, when it’s sought consensus, not when it has sought division, not when it has gone after class warfare.”
National co-convenor of the Socialist Alliance, Peter Boyle, addresses the opening night session of the Marxism 2013 conference. Marxism 2013 has been organised by Socialist Alternative and supported by Socialist Alliance, Green Left Weekly & the Revolutionary Socialist Party. This talk discusses some of the challenges and prospects of left unity in Australia.
The ongoing strike at Sydney University attracted national media attention on March 26 when strike-supporting students were dragged from a lecture theatre by riot police.
The students were engaged in a “roaming picket” that was disrupting one of the few remaining classes held that day when police intervened. This sparked debate as to whether student supporters used appropriate tactics to make their presence heard.
On March 30, Students for Palestine organised a rally against Australian university complicit in Israel's crimes. BAE Systems is a defence company worth $US38 billion. They make everything from assault rifles, missiles, tanks, drones, nuclear weapons, and even the shackles used in Guantanamo Bay. BAE has been targeted because of the horrifying weapons systems it sells to Israel.
“While ALP politicians are fleeing in terror from factional and media accusations about using ‘class war rhetoric’, the reality is that there is an ongoing class war that is about to be dramatically escalated if Abbott wins the September 14 elections,” says Peter Boyle.
Boyle was preselected on April 3 by the Socialist Alliance to run in the federal seat of Sydney. He is a national co-convenor of the Socialist Alliance and has been an active socialist since the early 1970s, becoming radicalised around war, race and class issues.
He has two daughters and two grandchildren.
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