Zakia Baig from the Australian Hazara Women’s Friendship Network speaking at the rally.
One hundred and fifty people rallied in Melbourne on April 11 against the kidnapping of 31 Hazara people in Afghanistan. This action was part of Australia-wide rallies.
Naarm/Melbourne
Zakia Baig from the Australian Hazara Women’s Friendship Network speaking at the rally.
One hundred and fifty people rallied in Melbourne on April 11 against the kidnapping of 31 Hazara people in Afghanistan. This action was part of Australia-wide rallies.
About 2000 people joined a rally against racism in Federation Square on April 4. The Melbourne rally was the largest counter-mobilisation against the racist, “Reclaim Australia” protests organised across Australia. The Melbourne “Reclaim Australia” event was attended by about 500 people.
No McDonald’s in Tecoma campaigner Richard Pearson was cleared of the charge of “defacing a public footpath” by a Melbourne Magistrates Court.
Two groups of Tamils walked from Glen Waverley and Sunshine to the Melbourne CBD on March 15 to “alert Australians to war crimes and genocide in Sri Lanka”.
The walkers converged in front of the State Library, where a rally was held.
The Campaign for Tamil Justice organised the walk to coincide with a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council. The UNHRC meeting had been expected to hear a report on Sri Lanka by the UN human rights commissioner, but this has been delayed for at least six months.
About 1000 Aboriginal rights activists shut down Melbourne’s CBD on March 13 in a protest against the WA government’s plan to close 150 of the state’s 274 remote Indigenous communities. The communities house more than 12,000 Aboriginal people.
Protest organier Meriki Onus, a member of Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, said Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s comments that living in remote communities was a “lifestyle choice” were “blatantly racist”.
It is hard to distill what it is like to live in poverty into a few words, because poverty is so huge and complex, particularly for single mothers.
On my own, it’s easy to feel powerless to do anything about it and as a woman the injustice of poverty makes me so angry.
It makes me angry that in one of the most prosperous countries in the world, we have more than 600,000 children living in poverty.
It makes me angry that right now there are women and children living in cars or in unsafe and insecure housing because rents have become impossible to manage.
The following speech was delivered on behalf of the Kurdish Women’s Movement by Seval Ulus to the International Women’s Day rally in Melbourne on March 8.
* * *
On the anniversary of the March 8, International Women’s Day, women around the world are continuing to resist against the patriarchal system.
Over a hundred years ago working women stood up against an oppressive system that has raged for thousands of years. This March, their struggle is still echoing on the streets of the world. The resistance against inequality, sexism and violence is growing by the day.
The Refugee Action Collective held a public meeting in Melbourne on February 23 to discuss the situation in Sri Lanka after the January 8 presidential election, at which Maithripala Sirisena defeated incumbent president Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Trevor Grant, the author of Sri Lanka’s Secrets: how the Rajapaksa regime gets away with murder, told the meeting that Sirisena had been a member of Rajapaksa’s cabinet for 10 years.
He was acting defence minister in May 2009, in the final days of the war, when the slaughter of Tamils by the Sri Lankan armed forces was at its height.
Refugee activists interrupted the Australian Open tennis tournament during the men’s final, unfurling a banner demanding the closure of the Manus Island immigration detention centre.
In the middle of the second set, protesters draped the banner over the court wall. The protest was filmed by television cameras and broadcast around the world.
The banner read “Australia Open for refugees” with the hashtag #shutdownmanus. Two women who jumped on court were arrested, while at least another four people — wearing handmade “Australia Open for Refugees” shirts — were evicted from the match.
More than 10,000 followers of the beautiful game sang, danced, shouted and chanted their way into AAMI Park for the Palestine vs Jordan match in this year’s Asian Cup.
Although the 5-1 result in Jordan’s favour was no real surprise, supporters were as jubilant at the mere presence of the Palestinian team as they were at its first tournament goal.
The Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption, appointed by the Abbott government and headed by retired judge Dyson Heydon, released its interim report on December 19. The report called for criminal charges to be laid against several Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) officials, including charges of blackmail against the CFMEU's Victorian state secretary John Setka and assistant secretary Shaun Reardon.
Otis lift workers in Melbourne claimed victory on December 17 after an eight-week lockout when they voted to accept an agreement that included all but one of their demands.
The 174 Otis workers had been trying to negotiate with the company since April. With the company insisting on a below-inflation 1% wage increase, the workers began industrial action at the end of September with bans on overtime, shiftwork and the commissioning of lifts and escalators.
The company responded by locking out the workers on October 21.
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