On April 29, PM Kevin Rudd announced an extra 450 troops would be sent to Afghanistan to participate in the latest US-led “surge”.
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For more than 100 years the WA seat of Fremantle has been safe Labor territory. Now, the May 16 state by-election for the seat is tipped to be a neck-and-neck race between ALP candidate Peter Tagliaferri and Adele Carles from the Greens.
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Ironically, it was the first of May — workers’ day — and we were protesting against privatisation outside the NSW Labor Party offices.
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In an act of peaceful civil disobedience, more than 500 Tamils occupied George Street in Sydney’s CBD for more than an hour. The May 1 action protested the genocide being carried out by the Sri Lankan government against the Tamil people in the north and east of the country.
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On March 21, Anna Bligh’s election victory night, she answered a question from a journalist about how it felt to be the first female premier to be elected in Australia. She suggested the snide remarks made when she was a young woman, about Queensland being a “backward” state, could now be laid to rest.
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The Kimberley Land Council has made a controversial in-principle agreement with Woodside Petroleum and the federal and WA state governments to develop a liquefied natural gas project at James Price Point near Broome.
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The government and most of the mainstream media want Australia to believe we are facing a “surge” of asylum seekers, threatening Australian borders as they arrive in dangerous and non-seaworthy boats.
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On April 21, SBS screened two documentaries about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution he is leading. One of them was The Hugo Chavez Show, produced by Frontline, a program on the US-based PBS channel.
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Telstra has once again started to sack staff. The communications union fears up to 2000 workers will be let go by mid-year. This makes a total of close to 12,000 job losses over the four years since CEO Sol Trujillo took the helm.
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Blacktown ALP NSW MP Paul Gibson has openly urged Premier Nathan Rees to make public transport free.
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On April 21, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd finally conceded that “it’s inevitable that Australia … will be dragged into recession”.
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For the annual May Day march in Wollongong this year, workers and the community will march under the banner, “Put jobs before profits”. Now that our PM has finally admitted Australia faces a recession, these four words sum up nicely a just response to the crisis.