Aboriginal activists rallied on the steps of parliament house in Perth on November 12 to protest against the Western Australian government’s plan to close 150 remote Aboriginal communities. The rally also condemned the federal government’s plan to cut funding to 180 remote indigenous communities...
Issue 1034
Australia
Hundreds of members of the NSW Public Service Association rallied outside state parliament on November 13 to protest against the government’s privatisation of disability services over the next 12 months.
Ageing, Disability and Home Care (ADHC) is part of the NSW Department of Family and...
Howard Byrnes from the Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union (CFMEU) and Lisa Newman from the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) addressed a forum organised by the Sydney Union Activists Network on November 15.
Byrnes, a CFMEU delegate and member of the union's state management...
Activists tried to stop the transfer of asylum seekers from Villawood in Sydney to Yongah Hill in Western Australia on November 12 and 13.
Activists heard that 65 asylum seekers would be transferred following on from the forcible transfer of at least 83 refugees from Villawood in April...
Carrying signs declaring "Hands off our Aunty", and "Save our local ABC", supporters of the ABC rallied outside the ABC's North Coast NSW studio in Lismore on November 20.
The protest formed one of a series of rallies around the country in support of the national broadcaster over the...
Protesters rallied outside the South Australian Labor Party convention in Adelaide on November 15.
They were protesting against South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill's endorsement of mining magnate Andrew Forrest's controversial Indigenous Employment and Training Review....
The number of people on the waiting list for public housing in NSW has increased by 3.5% in the past year to almost 60,000. This is forecast to increase to 80,000 in 2016.
According to a report last year by the NSW auditor-general, the present figure represents only about half of the...
More than 200 people attended a candidates meeting in the Sydney suburb of Haberfield, called by WestCON Action Groups and Save Ashfield Park.
The standing-room-only meeting to discuss the proposed WestConnex tunnel through the area heard from Labor, Greens and Socialist Alliance...
The G20 barriers were still in place, the interstate police contingents had not left Brisbane, and US President Barack Obama’s “Brisbane” speech calling for protection for the Great Barrier Reef was still resonating when Premier Campbell Newman announced he had brokered a deal with Indian mining...
An emergency protest was called on November 20 to save Melbourne's Palace Theatre.
Dozens of protesters rallied outside the building the same evening to stop it being demolished. The rally was met with resistance by a group of unidentified young men who intimidated and physically...
World
Nationwide protests erupted for the second night in a row on November 25. Protest explodd afater a grand jury decision the day before to not indict Missouri police officer Darren Wilson for fatally shooting unaramed Black teenager Michael Brown in August.
In Ferguson, Missouri, more than...
Protesters began to gather on the streets around the greater St Louis area on November 24, ahead of the decision of a jury on whether or not a white police officer should face charges over his shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Black youth Michael Brown in August.
St Louis County Prosecutor...
US police began an investigation on November 24 into the death of a 12-year-old boy who was fatally shot by Cleveland officers after he brandished a replica gun.
The boy died from his wounds on November 23, a day after officers responded to an emergency call about someone waving a “...
In a move that surprised many ― and symbolises Israel's growing isolation and global opposition to its crimes ― former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr has publicly declared his opposition to Israeli policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
Carr's change in position was announced...
A coalition of French left groups held nation-wide demonstrations on November 15 against the new austerity budget of the unpopular Socialist Party (PS) government.
The protests called for a redistribution of wealth from finance and big business to workers and the poor, creating jobs,...
For the first time since the eurozone crisis began in 2009, the Greek economy has reported a yearly growth of 0.6%. Unemployment is also down ― to a still-staggering 25.8%.
However, you wouldn’t see any economic change on the streets; rather, the only changes visible in Greece are...
Faced with growing public revolt against the introduction of water charges and faltering support, the Irish government is in a deepening crisis.
The government ― a coalition between the right-wing Fine Gael (FG) party and the Irish Labour Party ― came to power in 2011 on the back of...
Leslie Feinberg, who identified as an anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist, died on November 15, aged 65.
She succumbed to complications from multiple tick-borne co-infections, including Lyme disease, babeisiosis and...
After years of a rigged task force; horrific planning and zoning meetings; city council discussions; countless hours flyering, rallying and tabling; untold industry threats; and thousands of hours of sleep lost, residents in the Texas city of Denton won a ban on hydraulic fracturing within the...
Thousands of workers, campesinos, members of civil society, and students marched in Mexico City on November 20 to demand justice for the missing 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers' school.
They were joined by the family members of the missing students, who have been traveling in...
President Evo Morales and his party, Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), won a resounding victory last month. This gave the Morales administration a further five-year term to deepen the progress of the past nine years.
I was privileged to take part in a delegation to Bolivia via the New...
United States President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping of China have signed a bilateral climate agreement.
Much of the US and British media, and many US Democrats, have hailed the deal as a key step forward. Many US Republicans have attacked it as going much too far....
The statement below was released by the Party of the European Left (EL) on November 17. The EL is a Europe-wide political party that formed in 2004. It is composed of 26 member parties and seven observer parties. Visit www.european-left.org for more information.
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A delegation...
Sinnathamby Krishnarajah was arrested on October 25, in Kilinochchi, a town in the north of Sri Lanka.
His “crime” was to photocopy forms printed from the internet to be used for making affidavits to a United Nations investigation of war crimes committed during the war between the Sri...
Analysis
Five hundred people rallied in Melbourne on November 15 to protest against the Coalition government's proposed East West toll road. The rally had three main demands: scrap the East West Link, rip up the contracts and invest in public transport.
Socialist Alliance candidate for the seat...
The following is an open letter to Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett by Aboriginal campaigner Iva Hayward-Jackson.
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Recently the Premier of Western Australia, Colin Barnett, committed to closing down approximately 150 remote Aboriginal communities in Western Australia...
Here are some numbers. There were 51.2 million refugees and displaced people worldwide at the end of last year. About 11,000 Australian protection visas are available, worldwide, each year, for people overseas who have applied for asylum.
Australia’s total share of the 11.7 million...
Sean Brocklehurst is the Socialist Alliance candidate for Pascoe Vale and Sarah Hathway is the Socialist Alliance candidate for Geelong in the Victorian elections on November 29. They released this statement on November 16.
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Climate change is already killing hundreds of people...
As the G20 wrapped up in Brisbane last week, national leaders issued a statement to announce the key issues they would focus on until the next meeting.
This included the creation of jobs through growth, with the ambitious target of growing the GDP of G20 countries by 2% over the next...
Climate change is the biggest and most urgent threat facing humanity today.
We are seeing global temperatures rise at an unprecedented rate, with 13 of the 14 warmest years on record having occurred in the past 14 years.
In fact, if you are under 37 years of age, you have never...
The word “socialist” first appeared in print in Italy in 1803. In the early 19th century there appeared to be two alternative roads to socialism: violent revolution or establishing cooperative communities separate from the state and capitalist social relations.
Towards the latter part of...
Earlier this year, US and European banks — the ones that were too big to fail — settled US$18 billion worth of fines with regulators.
These fines were for money laundering activities, breaching sanctions violations, and manipulating the Libor (London interbank offered rate). The Libor is...
Culture
Cesar Chavez
Directed by Diego Luna
Written by Keir Pearson
Australian release TBA
The 1936 National Labor Relations Act in the United States recognised the rights of US workers to organise and collectively bargain -- but excluded farm workers...
Mira Canning Stock Route Project
http://mira.canningstockrouteproject.com
In the early part of the 20th century, the “Kings in Grass Castle” ― the cattle barons of northern Western Australia ― were profit-gouging the beef trade through controlling...
The Political Bubble: Why Australians Don’t Trust Politics
Mark Latham
Macmillan, 2014
291 pages, $32.99 (pb)
The only thing surprising about the 4% of Australians who a poll last year said “almost always” trusted the federal government is that...
Forgotten War
By Henry Reynolds
New South, 2013
In August, Prime Minister Tony Abbott attended a ceremony in Sydney to mark the 100 years since the Australian Naval and Military Expedition Force sailed out of Sydney Harbour to German New Guinea shortly after Britain...
Fighting Fund
We can count on Prime Minister Tony Abbott to add insult to injury.
In front of the world at the G20 Summit in Brisbane, he arrogantly regurgitated the racist colonial fiction — repudiated in law by the High Court in the famous Mabo case in 1992 — that Australia was an empty...