Analysis

The Australian National University’s (ANU) sexuality department not only provides an invaluable support service to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer students on campus (LGBTIQ), it is also unashamedly political. For example, it has thrown its weight behind the campaign for equal marriage rights. So perhaps it is not surprising that the department has been challenged by homophobia on campus. In May during Pride Week, 500 posters were ripped down.

Ark Tribe’s battle with the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) may end on November 24, at the Adelaide Magistrates Court when Tribe's verdict is scheduled to be announced. This would end the two-year ordeal for Tribe and his family. The 47-year-old rigger is facing six months’ jail for not attending an ABCC interrogation over an “unauthorised” safety meeting on a building site at Flinders University in August 2008.

Freedom or at least women’s freedom is still defined by men’s perspective. There’s still a patriarchal attitude towards the woman’s independent decision making. Society’s attitude towards women’s religious beliefs are defined by patriarchal values. So if we happen to cover ourselves it must be because of the men who control us, not our own choice or beliefs. If we claim that we follow our own faith, it must be us who is brainwashed by a patriarchal society — but not a patriarchal society that tries to rip our headscarves off.

Green Left Weekly spoke to some of the progressive candidates running in the November 27 Victorian state elections. * * * Stephen Jolly Stephen Jolly is the Socialist Party candidate for Richmond. He was elected to the City of Yarra council in 2004. He first came to prominence in the campaign to reopen Richmond Secondary College. He spoke to GLW’s Narendra Mohan Kimmalapati. What is your platform for the election?

Workers downed tools at the Wonthaggi desalination plant, near Melbourne, after the November 18 Australian claimed senior managers of building contractor Thiess Degremont hired the Australian Security Intelligence group (ASI) to spy on union members, union delegates and others working on the project earlier this year. Thiess is a subsidiary of one of Australia’s largest companies, Leighton. The ASI is a company run by notorious strikebreaker Bruce Townsend, jailed in 2006 in Hobart for receiving stolen cars.

On November 18, the federal House of Representatives passed a motion calling on members to gauge their constituents’ views on marriage equality. The motion passed 73-72, opposed by the Liberal-National Coalition and independent MP Bob Katter. In his November 12 speech introducing the motion, Greens MP Adam Bandt explained that while his motion would not repeal discriminatory marriage laws, it would force parliament to recognise changing community views on the issue. His speech is abridged below.

When the Victorian Parliament decriminalised abortion two years ago, the battle was finally over, right? Then why is the Fertility Control Clinic in East Melbourne still targeted by anti-abortion zealots? And why, after five years, has Melbourne City Council started harassing clinic defenders, potentially handing a victory to those same zealots?

The South Australian Labor government’s public service cuts were passed through parliament on November 8, ignoring sharp criticism from the Public Service Association (PSA) and widespread protests. Australian Council of Trade Unions president Ged Kearney described the cuts as a form of “political terrorism”, in an address to the PSA that day. She said public funding issues would become increasingly frequent across Australia as governments continue to adopt “neoliberal, global agendas”.

If you relied on only mainstream media reports of the November 4 town hall meeting in Northam, you would conclude the Avon Valley town, one hour from Perth, is a seething hotbed of racism of the most vicious kind.

If truth is the first casualty of war, it certainly sustains critical injuries in peace. In Victoria our state seems to be in information lockdown. Much of the media have remained subservient to the armies of spin doctors, minders, advisers, pollsters and other such wired and hired guns. We have a veritable Blackwater of outsourcing to inner sanctum PR consultants. Daily, ministers and department heads refuse to directly answer questions. They stonewall, obfuscate, and withold the truth. There is little transparency or public accountability.

ALP activist Craig Giddins was one of six members of the Port Curtis and Hinterland branch who recently resigned in protest against Queensland Premier Anna Bligh’s public assets sell-off, especially QR National.

Having lived on the farm right next to the Northam army barracks since 1934, Eric Fox has seen a lot of people use the camp (and his farm) over the years. “The army used the farm extensively [in the early years of World War Two] as an extension of their training ground”, Fox told Green Left Weekly. “Later in the war, when the Italian prisoners of war were there, they weren’t very solidly interned — they walked over the farm as well. That didn’t worry us. They didn’t bother us.