Up to 100 people gathered outside Queensland state parliament to put the incoming government on notice that opposition to the Adani coal mine will be sustained until the project has been defeated.
Issue 1163
News
The Labor government and the Liberal National Party opposition both suffered swings against them in the November 25 Queensland election. Greens on the left and One Nation on the right both increased their vote, but it is not clear that either have won any seats. The final results will be unclear for days.
In a hotly contested byelection on November 18, Lidia Thorpe became the first indigenous woman to be elected to the Victorian Parliament.
Thorpe, standing for the Greens, won 45% of first preferences. She was trailed by Labor, which has held the seat since it was created 100 years ago, with 35% of first preferences. Thorpe won 56% on a two party preferred vote.
In a win for residents, the Markham Housing Estate in Ashburton has been saved from being partially privatised.
Coalition and Greens MPs voted on November 17 to stop the Labor state government from amending the planning laws that would allow the partial privatisation of the estate.
Workers at the Streets ice-cream factory in the south-western Sydney suburb of Minto voted on November 22 to end a boycott campaign against the company, after agreeing to ratify an in-principle agreement with Streets over pay and other issues.
The new agreement will reportedly give the workers a 5% wage increase over three years, maintain their current working conditions and rosters and add 39 new flexible part-time jobs to the company’s workforce.
Centrelink, the federal government's main social welfare agency, is planning to hire 1000 private labour-hire staff to carry out "debt recovery" operations and assist in enforcing compliance by welfare recipients.
This latest large-scale outsourcing exercise comes just a month after the Coalition government announced that controversial multinational corporation Serco would use 250 employees to staff a Centrelink call centre, supposedly to help reduce long waiting times.
A rally outside NSW Parliament on November 22 delivered more than 5000 letters to Premier Gladys Berejiklian, calling her to halt the controversial WestConnex tollway and initiate a thorough review of the wasteful $18 billion project.
Greens MPs Jenny Leong and Jamie Parker, City of Sydney Deputy Mayor Jess Miller, independent MP Alex Greenwich and Inner West councillor Pauline Lockie called on the NSW government to listen to the growing opposition.
A new report has found it would cost $1.3 billion more to keep the Liddell coal-fired power plant in New South Wales open beyond its use-by date, than to replace it with a mix of renewables and other sustainable energy solutions.
As the tropical sun set over Manus Island detention centre on November 23, Walid Zazai wrote on Twitter for the final time that night. He reflected on the day as:
“A day of horror. A day of fear. A day I will never forget.
“I thought I’m back in Afghanistan in a war zone. There was no way to hide, just the sky.
“Friends have been beaten, have been taken by force to town centres.
“Don't know what will happen tomorrow. Remember us in your prayers.”
A group of Christian activists, charged with entering the top secret Pine Gap Joint Defence Facility near Alice Springs, have been found guilty. In a separate trial, a man has been found guilty of the same offence. They all face a maximum sentence of seven years’ jail.
More than 60 Aboriginal community members from across the Northern Territory gathered on Larrakia Country in Darwin over November 18–19 to discuss how to stop fracking from destroying the Territory.
They came from Alice Springs, Borroloola, Mataranka, Minyerri, Maningrida, Marlinja, Tennant Creek, Yuendumu, Jilkminggan and Katherine to demand a permanent fracking ban, saying they fear for the future of their land and culture if the moratorium ends.
Activists from the Oakey Coal Action Alliance, Great Sandy Strait Saviours and Lock the Gate gathered in the park across the road from New Hope Coal’s AGM in Ipswich on November 16 with a message for shareholders.
Accompanied by a giant inflatable cow, the protesters’ message was that New Hope is wasting its money on legal battles and public relations campaigns.
#CantStandBy (CSB) is a decentralised online network similar to Anonymous or Occupy.
This network aims to make the Australian government’s regime of refugee detention so economically, politically and socially expensive that they have no choice but to abandon this policy.
The Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory handed down its final report on November 17.
The commission was called after a July 2016 Four Corners report showed chronic levels of abuse in the NT’s youth detention system. Video footage showed instances of guards stripping detained children naked and piling on top of them, and of guards applying painful restraint holds to children as young as 12.
People across the world are taking action to show solidarity with the men in Manus Island detention centre who now gone for more than three weeks without food, water and medical support since the Australian government closed the centre at the end of October.
Analysis
The scenes are horrendous. Defenceless people, who are desperately seeking protection, find themselves at the mercy of authoritarian bullies. All they seek is safety.
And yet the totalitarian Yes voters are deaf to their pleas, as No voters, seeking nothing more than the right to institutionalised bigotry, suffer in silence with only huge swathes of the government and the Murdoch press daring to raise their voices on their behalf.
The federal Coalition government is on the skids. It seems only a matter of time before it will be forced to an early election.
The latest sign of panic by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was the November 20 decision to delay the last sitting of the House of Representatives by a week to December 4.
The stated justification for this blatant lock-out of opposition and independent MPs — that it would facilitate the passing of equal marriage legislation by the end of the year — does not wash.
Pas Forgione is state coordinator of Anti-Poverty Network South Australia (APNSA), a non-government organisation with a difference.
APNSA is made up of welfare recipients and other low-income people who organise and campaign in defence of society’s marginalised people.
Green Left Weekly’s Renfrey Clarke spoke to Forgione.
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I was privileged to be invited to observe a National Gathering of First Nations peoples on November 4–5 at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra.
Representatives from many different clan groups from a large number of First Nations across the continent attended. It was a direct response to the events at Uluru earlier in the year, with regard to Constitutional Recognition. Its initial purpose being to discuss the formalisation of a process of recognition of each tribe’s sovereignty.
After depriving hundreds of men of food, water and medical support for more than three weeks, Papua New Guinea police moved into Manus Island detention centre on November 23.
They are forcing the 400 men left in the centre to move to alternative accommodation on Manus Island which, according to Kurdish asylum seeker and journalist Behrouz Boochani, is like “moving to another prison”.
The statements, photos and videos that have emerged from the refugees inside paint a brutal and tragic picture.
When you think of devastating deforestation and extinction you usually think of the Amazon, Borneo and the Congo.
But eastern Australia ranks alongside these in the top 10 of the world’s major deforestation fronts — the only one in a developed nation. Most of the clearing is happening in Queensland and it is accelerating.
World
After an announcement from the Donald Trump administration that it is terminating temporary protections for about 59,000 Haitians who fled to the United States after a devastating 2010 earthquake, journalist Naomi Klein warns decisions by the United States and Canadian governments indicate how wealthy nations may handle climate refugees in the years to come.
The struggle in Catalonia for self determination has shaken the whole Spanish state. It has forced all political forces to take a stance.
Much of the left across the Spanish state, while not supporting the repression of the right-wing government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, have also not supported Catalonia’s independence process.
More than 1000 students marched through the streets of Jaffna demanding freedom for Tamil political prisoners on November 14.
An appeal issued by the Jaffna Universty Students Union read: "At least 132 Tamil political prisoners are languishing in the prisons of Sri Lankan state across the island. Many of them have been detained for years without trial".
After 60 days of discussions, negotiations for a new governing coalition have failed in Germany, leaving the country without a government.
Last September’s general election – in which the far-right obtained an unprecedented and alarming result – left no party with an absolute majority, forcing incumbent Chancellor Angela Merkel to look for partners to form a new government.
In the weeks since evidence of film producer Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long pattern of sexual abuse surfaced, millions of women, trans and gender nonconforming people, even men around the world, have exposed the scale of sexual violence in our society, using the #MeToo hashtag to tell their stories.
#MeToo set off a profound moment of collective bravery, which would have been impossible without the broad sense of solidarity and support for those coming forward.
Los Angeles streets were swarmed by the thousands of protesters on November 12 as Hollywood was taken by storm by a march inspired by the #MeToo Twitter campaign.
In support of victims of sexual assault and harassment, thousands of demonstrators marched, pausing in front of CNN’s headquarters.
St. Lucia Prime Minister Allen Chastanet said climate change could devastate Caribbean islands if global leaders do not act now to stop its extreme effect on the small islands.
Since Chile’s return to democracy in 1990 after the fall of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, the South American nation has maintained a largely stable and predictable political system. However, the stability of this post-Pinochet political set up has seemingly come to an end.
A clear expression of this was the results of the presidential and parliamentary elections held on November 19.
It is no secret that in today’s corporate-dominated media landscape, Venezuela appears almost ubiquitously as a synonym of “dictatorship”.
This is why many may be surprised that Venezuela will hold its 23rd election in 18 years on December 10 when Venezuelans go to the polls to elect local mayors.
Culture
Margaret Atwood is blessed and/or cursed with the credit for this year’s go-to feminist analogy. Any time an old white man makes it clear that women are best kept silent and pregnant, someone says that it’s “just like The Handmaid’s Tale”.
Nick Cave and his band the Bad Seeds ignored pleas by Palestinians and international artists for a cultural boycott of Israel in protest at its polices of apartheid and occupation, playing two shows in Tel Aviv on November 19 and 20.
Cave also took the opportunity to belittle and denigrate the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. He repeated false claims used and marketed by anti-Palestinian lobby groups to discredit the campaign.
In 1960, trainee priest Thomas Keneally abandoned the seminary at Manly on Sydney’s North Shore without any qualifications other than a Bachelor of Theology and with no skills other than medieval Latin.
His escape from his crisis of confidence in the Catholic Church, says Stephany Steggall in her biography of the Australian novelist, was through writing. This was both Keneally’s attempt to understand, and keep at bay, the “madness and melancholia” of the human lot, and his own course of personal therapy for exorcising the mental demons that haunted him for six years in an uncaring, dogmatic institution with its “anti-human moral code”.
Ignoring a call from more than 170 Palestinian civil society organisations for a boycott of Israel over its policies of apartheid and occupation, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds played two sold-out gigs in Tel Aviv on November 19 and 20.
Nick Cave and his band also ignored the example and calls by many other musicians organised in Artists for Palestine, such as Roger Walters and Brian Eno among the most prominent voices.
Resistance!
British, US-based alt-right commentator and former editor at Breitbart News, Milo Yiannopoulos will be visiting Australia as part of his “Troll Academy” tour in December.