Analysis

Uncle Kevin Buzzacott

Whatever BHP Billiton wants to expand operations at its huge Olympic Dam copper, gold and uranium mine, Australian authorities are almost frantic to give it. Clear violations of environment laws are not even being allowed to stand in the way.

So it has been reported that Clive “Stop Taxing Me” Palmer's main private company, Mineralogy, hasn't paid tax for three years. He really is pulling out all stops to be the best cardboard cutout evil capitalist he can. You have to wonder what he'll do next. My guess is call a press conference to announce he's established a paramilitary organisation of Nazi kittens dedicated to wiping out what's left of Australia's native fauna.
There is a lot to celebrate in the legacy of retiring Greens leader Senator Bob Brown. Above all, he has been central to holding together the most successful new electoral party project in Australia that sits significantly to the left of the traditional parties of government, Labor and Liberal-National. The Greens won 1.7 million votes out of 13 million voters in the last federal election.
Malalai Joya.

“You have to put more pressure on your government to allow Afghans to decide their own future,” Afghan democracy activist and former MP Malalai Joya told a 150-strong public forum on April 11. “No nation can liberate another nation,” Joya said. “Ten years of war should have made this clear. It's better the troops leave.”

Sam Castro from the WikiLeaks Australian Citizens Alliance recently sat down with Christine Assange to talk about her son Julian, WikiLeaks' editor-in-chief, his fight against extradition to Sweden and why fighting for Julian’s freedom is actually part of a much bigger fight to defend democracy in Australia.
Warren Mundine, a member and former National President of the ALP, and co-convener of the Australian Uranium Association’s Indigenous Dialogue Group, has been promoting the nuclear industry recently. Unfortunately he turns a blind eye to the industry's crude racism, a problem that ought to be core business for the Indigenous Dialogue Group.
In article after article, book after book, scientists and environmentalists have exposed the devastating effects of constant economic expansion on the global environment. The drive to produce ever more “stuff” is filling our rivers with poison and our air with climate-changing gases. The oceans are dying, species are dying out at unprecedented rates, water is running short, and soil is eroding much faster than it can be replaced. But the growth machine pushes on.
There is a country blessed with enormous natural resources whose head of state is a monarch who resides thousands of miles away from its shores. Every time Her Majesty comes to her dominion she lays flowers in the Cenotaph, visits schools where children wave flags that carry in one of their corners a symbol of a colonial past and talks to her subjects in civic centres. During her stay she is dutifully escorted by her representative in the host country and its political, economic and military classes.
Ismail Mirza Jan is a 27-year-old Hazara Afghan locked up in Sydney’s Villawood Detention Centre. After the Taliban killed his father in 1998, Jan fled to Britain and then Ireland in 2001. Eventually refused asylum, Jan came to Sydney by plane in February 2010 in the hope he could find refuge. Instead, Jan had to fight off a deportation attempt in November last year. He says this saved him from retaliation and probable death in Afghanistan.
Neville 'Killer' Kane (right) and Jimmy 'The Black Rat' Wilson.

Picture this scene — late April 1986, a group of a dozen builders labourers on a cold Melbourne morning. The time is about 7.30am. They were picketing a building site where they’d been sacked for refusing to resign from their union, the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF), which had recently been “deregistered” — a nice term for outlawed under Bob Hawke’s ALP federal government. The ALP premiers of New South Wales and Victoria, Neville Wran and John Cain, joined Hawke’s drive to outlaw the BLF.

Gormer Heinz tomato factory at Girgarre, Victoria.

Far from taking the closure of the Heinz tomato factory sitting down, workers and community members from the 150-strong rural Victorian town of Girgarre are getting organised.

Blue sign against a blue sky that reads 'productivity'.

Behind the hype of Australia’s mining boom and “economic stability” lies the very real crisis affecting rural Australia.