Analysis

Low-paid workers in luxury hotels, including cleaners and kitchen staff, were the first to lodge an application with Fair Work Australia (FWA) when the federal government’s new industrial relations regime, the Fair Work Act 2009, came into effect on July 1.
In his 2006 bestseller about climate change, Heat, British writer George Monbiot said his biggest worry was not that people would stop talking about climate change. His fear was that they’d talk us to kingdom come.
After Labor Premier Anna Bligh announced on June 2 that Queensland would be selling off $15.4 billion of the state’s assets, a June 17-18 Galaxy Poll conducted for the Brisbane Courier Mail found that 84% of people opposed the move.
There are few words that attract negative outbursts of emotions from Melbournians as much as the mere utterance of “Connex”.
The threat of the publication of damaging school league tables in New South Wales has been averted for the moment.
The ecological achievements of Cuba in the last two decades have been well documented. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s was the trigger for ending the unsustainable, industrial agriculture that Cuba had practised for decades.
Australian cities are growing in population and in geographic spread. Urban sprawl, encouraged by governments at all levels, is pushing suburbia in all directions.
The following article is based on a speech by John Rice to the 1500-strong June 13 Adelaide Climate Emergency Rally. Rice is a member of the Climate Emergency Action Network (CLEAN) in South Australia.
The first person to die after testing positive to swine flu in Australia was a 26-year-old Aboriginal man from a remote desert community. Health workers have said it is evidence of the significant gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous health, and warn more deaths are likely.
The inquest into the death in custody of Palm Island man Mulrunji Doomadgee in November, 2004 will be reopened. In 2006, deputy state coroner Christine Clements found senior sergeant Chris Hurley was responsible for Doomadgee’s death.
“Tasers are not the ’non-lethal’ weapons the QPS [Queensland Police Service] leadership claims”, former state MP and former police officer Peter Pyke told the media in April. He predicted a Queenslander would die in 2009 from a Taser.
“Some may be disappointed in some parts of this bill”, deputy prime minister and workplace relations minister Julia Gillard told parliament on June 17.