Despite widespread opposition, forest giant Gunns Ltd is still pressing ahead with its proposed pulp mill in the pristine Tamar Valley in northern Tasmania. But the campaign against it shows no signs of going away.
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We would have loved for them to be bigger, but the June 13 national climate rallies were an unmistakable step forward for the climate action movement. More than 11,000 rallied nationally, making them the largest climate actions yet in the era of PM Kevin Rudd.
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Saharawi refugee and preschool teacher Fetim Sellami is a central character in the Australian documentary Stolen, a film set in the refugee camps in south-west Algeria that have been home to 165,000 Saharawi refugees since their country, Western Sahara, was invaded by Morocco in 1975. However, when she and her husband, Baba Hocine Mahfoud, attended its June 11 premiere at the Sydney Film Festival, they did not receive red carpet treatment, despite the long distance they had travelled.
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Three months after wining a state election, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has been given the green light by the June 6-7 ALP state conference to push ahead with her $15 billion sell-off of state-owned assets.
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On the morning of May 31, international students in Melbourne began a powerful protest against the recent street violence that has targeted South Asian international students in particular.
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Joe de Bruyn, national secretary of the Shop Distributors Alliance and Allied Employees Association (SDA) and fervent Catholic militant had some novel advice on how to resolve the debate about the Australian Building Construction Commission (ABCC) within his Labor Party.
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On May 29, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told radio 3AW that his government has absolutely no plans to make any change to the superannuation preservation age the age at which workers may access the superannuation paid into a super fund by their employer.
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On May 31 in Melbourne, 5000 angry students marched against the increasing number of violent attacks on Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi students.
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Recent protests by Indian students in Australia have drawn global attention to a resurgence of racist violence in Australian cities. An Indian student lies in a Melbourne hospital recovering from serious stab wounds to his abdomen, while others live in terror.
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Delivering for all Working Australians was the slogan for the 2009 Australian Council of Trade Unions congress held June on 2-4. This raises the question what if you are not working or an Australian citizen? But the congress will not be remembered for such philosophical questions there were many more immediate issues at stake.
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Jean Hale (nee Heathcote) was born on July 29, 1912 in Brisbane. Her grandfather, Wyndham Selfe Heathcote, was an Anglican clergyman who opposed the Boer War. His opposition to the Anglican Church’s social policies and his opinions, such as this from one of his essays – “The death of Jesus, as a social reformer using direct action, has been transmuted into the death of a God dying for the world” – found him at loggerheads with the Church and resulted in his leaving to become a Unitarian Minister.
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On June 3, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released its estimates of the national accounts for Australia for the January-March quarter. Following on from a small overall drop in gross domestic product (GDP) of 0.6% for the December quarter, a fall in the March quarter would mean that Australia had entered a technical recession.