A gay Bangladeshi couple have been battling to gain citizenship in Australia for 10 years. The Refugee Review Tribunal knocked back their claims three times, and three times a higher court has overturned the rulings.
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Ethical elitism My article "Ethical elitism on climate change?" (GLW #814) and Simon Butler's response, "Ethical elitism?", (GLW #815) are both unnecessarily caustic. This culture that sees it as acceptable to humiliate political opponents (or
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Every time capitalist politicians play with racist prejudice against asylum seekers, there are violent consequences. I'm not just referring to the threatened forceful disembarkation of the Tamil refugees from the Oceanic Viking, which is outrageous. The bipartisan anti-asylum seeker rhetoric in Canberra is also very likely provoking more racist violence across Australia.
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Admit it: you’re just a little disturbed when industrialists, fossil-fuel lobbyists and the Liberal and National parties thunder that big, quick cuts to carbon emissions would bankrupt Australian business. Well, aren’t you?
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On November 2, 1923, 636 members of the Victorian police force went on strike. All were sacked and replaced by volunteer strikebreakers.
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A bus-load of climate change activists made a seven-day journey from Newcastle through coal communities in the Hunter Valley, Gunnedah and Western coalfields over November 20 — 26.
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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.
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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).
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There are three main problems with the nuclear “solution” to climate change — it is a blunt instrument, a dangerous one, and it is unnecessary.
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A domestic violence shelter in Alice Springs told ABC radio’s AM on May 1 that between January 1 and mid-April this year, it provided accommodation for 157 children and 149 women. However, due to lack of funding, it turned away a further 158 women and 100 children seeking support.
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A wave of deep moral revulsion swept through everyone in this country with a social conscience after Labor PM Kevin Rudd uttered that ugly sentence: “This government makes no apology for a hard-line approach to people smuggling and border security.”
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Simon Butler precisely explains his concerns about the inadequacy of the Greens’ climate change amendment proposals (“The good and the bad of the Greens CPRS amendments”, GLW #814). However, like the mainstream media, he overlooks some of the Greens’ visionary bills on efficiency and renewables-friendly demand management.