The Australian government is getting desperate and showing its true colours. Not long after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd personally intervened to turn away a boat of 260 Tamil refugees in international waters, a second boat — also carrying refugees from Sri Lanka — sent out a distress signal off the coast of Sumatra.
Analysis
The Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) — a right-wing economic think tank — released its What’s Next for Welfare-to-Work? report on October 15. As part of a strategy to push more people off welfare, the report called for a fall in the minimum wage and a tightening of eligibility rules for the Disability Support Pension (DSP).
What do a Jewish congregation in the Alaskan town of Fairbanks, the Browniz coffee shop in the port city of Salalah, Oman and a Shanghai primary school have in common?
The 350.org campaign has already made an important impact worldwide. The recent spike in official 350.org actions — now well above 2000 — suggests the number of people who support stabilising atmospheric CO2 at under 350 parts per million (ppm) has grown phenomenally in the past few months.
Lewis Carroll once wrote about a fictitious map that was so topographically accurate, it was as large as the country it was mapping.
The Greens released a set of 22 amendments to the Rudd Labor government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) on October 12.
Wake up Australia. Do not trivialise the racist attitudes coming from various sectors of our society.
The eighth anniversary of the war in Afghanistan has come and gone. As Prime Minister Kevin Rudd considers yet another troop surge, for most Australians this milestone represents just another statistic, another number to skip over in the morning papers.
I am part of Critical Climate, an Adelaide activist group advocating a “sustained mass civil disobedience” response to the climate emergency.
On October 15, almost 260 Tamil refugees were stranded at an Indonesian port in west Java. They were refusing to disembark from the boat that had carried them from Malaysia and pleaded for the Australian government to hear their case. That evening they declared a hunger strike.
In early September, most abortions performed in Queensland health facilities came to a halt. The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists had passed on a legal opinion to their members that said doctors were still at risk of prosecution while abortion remained in the criminal code.
In May last year, federal Treasurer Wayne Swan announced the formation of the Australia’s Future Tax System Review, to be run by Treasury secretary Ken Henry. When the Henry review reports to government in December, its recommendations are likely to leave the wealthy smiling and the rest of us grinding our teeth.
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