Feminism is experiencing a revival in Adelaide with the formation of a new activist group, the South Australian Feminist Collective.
The group emerged from a feminist forum jointly hosted by Socialist Alliance and Femment, which followed the recent Adelaide “SlutWalk” march against sexual assault and victim-blaming. The forum explored the politics of this event and the relevance of feminism today.
About 30 people attended the collective’s first meeting on June 25.
The meeting began discussion about how the group would be run, its aims and values.
Analysis
The City of Sydney has voted to replace the words “European arrival” in the official record with “invasion”.
The deputy lord mayor, Marcelle Hoff, says it is intellectually dishonest to use any other word in describing how Aboriginal Australia was dispossessed by the British.
“We were invaded,” said Paul Morris, an Aboriginal adviser to the council. “It is the truth and it shouldn’t be watered down. We wouldn’t expect Jewish people to accept a watered-down version of the Holocaust, so why should we?”
The Socialist Alliance adopted a coal seam gas policy at its June 26 National Council meeting. The policy appears below.
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The gas industry is rapidly increasing its scope in the Australian energy market. Gas is talked up by some as a clean energy source, or as a “transition fuel”, while we develop renewable energies. But gas is a fossil fuel. Burning it creates carbon emissions.
For a safe climate, we need to cut net emissions almost totally within the next decade. In fact, we then have to move below zero net emissions: to draw down more carbon than we produce.
Several months after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, we’re beginning to get a sense of the likely long-term impacts.
Radiation has spread across much of the northern hemisphere and parts of the southern hemisphere, including northern Australia.
Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency estimates the radioactive release at 770,000 terabecquerels in the first week of the crisis.
Total radiation releases will probably fall somewhere between 10-40% of those from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Radiation releases have not been stopped and will continue for some months.
I was 12 years old when for the first time in my life I became a citizen of a country — Australia. Before that, I was a stateless Palestinian refugee.
There were two laments my parents always repeated whenever they spoke of their place of origin Palestine: if only we could have stayed and if only we could return.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said in 2009 there were more than 10 million refugees around the world in need of assistance.
I was 12 years old when for the first time in my life I became a citizen of a country — Australia. Before that, I was a stateless Palestinian refugee.
There were two laments my parents always repeated whenever they spoke of their place of origin Palestine: if only we could have stayed and if only we could return.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said in 2009 there were more than 10 million refugees around the world in need of assistance.
Over three nights last week, hundreds of thousands of people watched something very rare: a Reality TV show that actually showed some reality.
Australia’s public SBS television station showed a special three-episode program called Go Back To Where You Came From about the experience of six Australians (with widely varying views about refugees and asylum seekers) as they are sent on a 25-day trip to trace, in reverse, the routes that refugees have taken to reach Australia.
This article is based on a June 24 statement released by Socialist Alliance members in Tasmania.
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Socialist Alliance members were outraged by the harsh, neoliberal budget handed down by the Tasmanian Labor-Greens government on June 16.
The budget slashes $1.4 billion from the public sector over the next four years, including a $100 million cut to health within the next financial year and the closure of 20 schools.
At least 1700 full-time equivalent jobs will be scrapped, including 100 police jobs.
On June 22, the federal government announced a six-week consulting period before creating new laws to continue the Northern Territory intervention. Prime Minister Julia Gillard “left no doubt that abolishing the intervention was not on the agenda”, said the June 23 Australian.
The statement below, titled Rebuilding From the Ground Up — an Alternative to the Northern Territory Intervention, was officially launched at the Prescribed Area People’s Alliance conference in Darwin on June 21.
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The NT intervention has been a disaster for Aboriginal communities.
In a show of anger against the attacks on workers rights by NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell, 12,000 public sector workers stopped work and rallied outside NSW parliament on June 15.
The protest was organised in just over a week, and several unions, including the Nurses Federation and the fire fighters took stopwork action on the day.
In spite of constant rain, the rally spread out for more than a block along Macquarie Street and into Martin Place.
The June 10 Sydney Morning Herald said that a study released by the National Union of Students (NUS) that day indicated a “surprisingly high proportion of female university students have been sexually assaulted, stalked or sexually harassed”.
The article mentioned an Australian Defence Force Academy student who, after being raped, had experienced attitudes of “just get over it” from fellow students — a culture of silence surrounds such attacks.
Unions Tasmania President Roz Madsen gave the speech below at a large June 16 rally outside the Tasmanian parliament — the day Tasmanian premier Lara Giddings announced a harsh new budget.
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Not so long ago, politicians and political parties were fairly predictable. People entered politics on one side or the other, based on a set of values they held personally and then they pursued outcomes designed to fulfill those values.
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