Like all people across Australia, Socialist Alliance members have been devastated by the Victorian bushfire tragedy, the greatest disaster in peace-time Australian history.
News
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Although the parish priest of St Marys Catholic Church in South Brisbane, Father Peter Kennedy, was summarily sacked on February 6, the parishs 1000-strong congregation has vowed to defy the order and support their much-loved priest.
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Twenty people attended a meeting to discuss the need for greater solidarity with Palestine on February 11. The meeting, organised by the Socialist Alliance, featured Abe Quadan, a Council member of the Centre of Peace and Conflict Studies at the
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Sixty women gathered outside the Tasmanian parliament on February 13 — the day before Valentines Day — to urge Premier David Bartlett to not "tear the heart out of Tasmania". The women invited Bartlett on a "Valentines Day date" to the
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As soon as the devastation of the Victorian bushfires became known, unions began organising to help bushfire victims.
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Thirty-five people packed into the Activist Centre on February 13 to hear Dr Brian Seneviratne speak on the present situation in the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka. The meeting was hosted by the Socialist Alliance. Seneviratne, who was born into the
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One hundred people marched through Redfern on February 14 to mark the fifth anniversary of the death of a young local Aboriginal man, TJ Hickey. Hickey was impaled on a fence, allegedly as a result of a police vehicle chasing him and ramming his
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— In late following the riots on Palm Island after death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee in 2004. Wotton was charged under anti-rioting legislation. Sydney's inner-west Film Fanatics has made an appeal to Queensland's governor Penelope Wensley
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The ACT Legislative Assembly debated draconian anti-bill posting legislation on February 11. The legislation was introduced by the ALP. The proposal penalties for putting up posters would be $10,000 for individuals — including event organisers
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In a 7000-word essay published in the February Monthly magazine , Prime Minister Kevin Rudd blames neoliberalism for the global economic crisis.
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Al Awda Hospital, established in 1997, is the largest facility of a larger organisation called the Union of Health Workers Committees. The UHWC was established in 1985 by volunteer doctors in Gaza who provided medical services to communities that did not have any medical coverage.
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Mike Crook says he became radicalised by seeing the way construction and mining companies treated their workforce, especially in regard to on-the-job safety.
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Palestine solidarity activists in Sydney have launched a campaign targeting Max Brenner Chocolates, a 100% Israeli-owned company belonging to the Strauss Group, as part of the growing international boycott Israel movement.
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The following is reprinted from the introduction to What Resistance Stands For. For more information, and to find out how to get involved with your local Resistance branch, visit http://www.resistance.org.au.
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The unfolding Latin American revolution and the call by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to build “socialism of the 21st century” will be big features of the “World at a Crossroads” conference to be held in Sydney over the Easter weekend.
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The death of Gemma Thoms at the Perth Big Day Out music festival on February 1 was tragic and preventable.
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With Victorias bushfire holocaust now confirmed as Australias worst-ever natural disaster, people are reasonably asking: are these events linked to climate change?
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When the authorities put the figures together, the death rates in Melbourne and Adelaide due to the recent heat wave will show a spike in response to the record temperatures over Eastern Australia.
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Sydney residents of the lower north shore and inner city are increasingly electing to drive to work despite living a relatively short bus ride from the heart of the city, a report in the February 10 Sydney Morning Herald concluded.
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The Sydney branch of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) and its supporters have rallied each day at Circular Quay since February 10.
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The following is an open letter to Indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin regarding the Northern Territory intervention. The letter was signed by the Prescribed Area People’s Alliance delegation to Canberra and presented to Macklin and others on February 4, 2009.
Analysis
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This column is usually devoted to an appeal for the Green left Weekly fighting fund but this week this space will be used to join in with the many trade unions, other groups and individuals who are rising in a huge display of solidarity to help the communities devastated by the unprecedented bushfires in Victoria.
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Nothing like the inferno that swept across Victoria last weekend has ever occurred in Australia before.
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New opportunities for socialists The capitalist media are constantly conveying the message of doom and gloom. Their reason is to instill fear into the workforce so as to try to prevent attempts by the trade unions to secure wage increases, and
World
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After it was officially announced that the “yes” vote had won the February 15 referendum on a constitutional amendment that would remove limits on the number of times any elected official could stand in elections for public office with 54.4% of the vote, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez delivered a speech from the balcony of the Miraflores Presidential Palace, his two daughters beside him. The victory removes the current two-term limit will allow Chavez to stand in the presidential election when his current term finishes at the end of 2012.
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On the weekend of February 7-8, over 600 delegates and as many observers attended the founding conference of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), held at la Plaine-Saint-Denis in the working class suburbs to the north of Paris.
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The longest strike in Anglo-Canadian history, at Toronto’s York University, has been suppressed by anti-union, legislation after a three-month long picket line.
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The statement below is abridged from an online petition calling for justice in the case Belfast human rights lawyer Pat Finucane, murdered 20 years ago by a death squad with links to the British state.
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The move to the right by the Socialist Party (PS), which drew the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Greens along in its wake, has been so clearly against the wishes of the support base of these parties that a significant vacuum in French politics has opened up to the left.
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Europe has all but exploded into the new year with a growing fightback against the policies that caused economic crisis across the continent. Millions of protesters are beginning to take on those responsible for the capitalist meltdown.
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We are the bat people, the people who lived under bridges in Manila, explained urban poor organiser Ka Lisa as she took a small group of international observers around a section of an urban poor relocation settlement in Bulacan, about 60 kilometres north of Manila.
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Luis Bilbao is an Argentine socialist currently based in Venezuela. He is the editor of the Latin America-wide magazine America XXI and is a central participant in the construction of the mass-based United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), the party initiated by President Hugo Chavez to help unite Venezuela’s revolutionary forces to push for the construction of a “socialism of the 21st century”.
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The international and domestic campaign against the Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez has dramatically escalated in the lead up to the February 15 referendum to remove the restriction on elected official standing for office if they have already served two terms.
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As Ecuadorians prepare for their first general elections under the progressive new constitution adopted in a referendum last year, tensions with the United States continue to rise with the government expelling a key US diplomat.
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Sri Lankan Air Force bombers destroyed the Ponnampalam Memorial Hospital in the town of Puthukkudiyiruppu in northern Sri Lanka on February 6. According to Tamilnet.com, 61 patients were killed in the attack.
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Five years ago, on February 29, 2004, Haiti’s popular, elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown by a right-wing paramilitary rebellion that received essential material and political backing from the United States, France, Canada and neighbouring Dominican Republic.
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On February 15, Venezuelans vote in a referendum on a proposed constitutional amendment that will allow for any candidate to stand for any elective office, without restriction on the number of terms they may serve.
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On February 4, Auckland’s Tamil community held a demonstration against the Sri Lankan Army’s (SLA) massive onslaught the Tamil people in the north of Sri Lanka. The day is Sri Lanka’s independence day.
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Dr Julian Isaias Rodriguez, a former vice president and participant in the drafting of the 1999 Venezuelan constitution, told Green Left Weekly that the proposed constitutional amendment to be voted on by the Venezuelan people on February 15 will allow people to be real protagonists and fundamental actors in making their own history.
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The historic struggle for national liberation, economic sovereignty, and the “refoundation” of Bolivia on the basis of justice for the impoverished indigenous majority achieved an important milestone on January 25, with the approval of the new Political Constitution of the State (CPE) by 61.43%.
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As of February 12, it was still unclear who will end up forming the next Israeli government following the February 10 parliamentary elections, with negotiations to form a new ruling coalition possibly continuing for six weeks. However, what is clear is that regardless of who the eventual prime minister is or which parties are in the cabinet, the brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is set to intensify.
Culture
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Revolutionary Road
Directed by Sam Mendes
Written by Justin Haythe and Richard Yates
With Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio
In cinemas -
Meltdown! A Socialist view of the Capitalist Crisis
By Tony Iltis, Lee Sustar, John Bellamy Foster, Phil Hearse, Adam Hanieh & Dave Holmes
Resistance Books, 2009
54 pages, $6.00
Available from http://www.resistancebooks.com -
Jerusalem Cuts — On May 14, 1948, eight hours before the British mandate over Palestine was to expire, Israel's future prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, declared independence for the state of Israel. SBS, Friday, February 20, 2.30pm. Blaktrax