Sam Castro from the WikiLeaks Australian Citizens Alliance recently sat down with Christine Assange to talk about her son Julian, WikiLeaks' editor-in-chief, his fight against extradition to Sweden and why fighting for Julian’s freedom is actually part of a much bigger fight to defend democracy in Australia.
Analysis
Warren Mundine, a member and former National President of the ALP, and co-convener of the Australian Uranium Association’s Indigenous Dialogue Group, has been promoting the nuclear industry recently. Unfortunately he turns a blind eye to the industry's crude racism, a problem that ought to be core business for the Indigenous Dialogue Group.
In article after article, book after book, scientists and environmentalists have exposed the devastating effects of constant economic expansion on the global environment. The drive to produce ever more “stuff” is filling our rivers with poison and our air with climate-changing gases. The oceans are dying, species are dying out at unprecedented rates, water is running short, and soil is eroding much faster than it can be replaced.
But the growth machine pushes on.
There is a country blessed with enormous natural resources whose head of state is a monarch who resides thousands of miles away from its shores.
Every time Her Majesty comes to her dominion she lays flowers in the Cenotaph, visits schools where children wave flags that carry in one of their corners a symbol of a colonial past and talks to her subjects in civic centres.
During her stay she is dutifully escorted by her representative in the host country and its political, economic and military classes.
Ismail Mirza Jan is a 27-year-old Hazara Afghan locked up in Sydney’s Villawood Detention Centre. After the Taliban killed his father in 1998, Jan fled to Britain and then Ireland in 2001.
Eventually refused asylum, Jan came to Sydney by plane in February 2010 in the hope he could find refuge. Instead, Jan had to fight off a deportation attempt in November last year. He says this saved him from retaliation and probable death in Afghanistan.
Picture this scene — late April 1986, a group of a dozen builders labourers on a cold Melbourne morning. The time is about 7.30am. They were picketing a building site where they’d been sacked for refusing to resign from their union, the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF), which had recently been “deregistered” — a nice term for outlawed under Bob Hawke’s ALP federal government. The ALP premiers of New South Wales and Victoria, Neville Wran and John Cain, joined Hawke’s drive to outlaw the BLF.
Far from taking the closure of the Heinz tomato factory sitting down, workers and community members from the 150-strong rural Victorian town of Girgarre are getting organised.
Behind the hype of Australia’s mining boom and “economic stability” lies the very real crisis affecting rural Australia.
“I was a people smuggler,” said Hungarian refugee and refugee rights activist Peter Farago to a public meeting of about 70 people in Melbourne on March 27.
The public meeting, titled “Smuggled to Freedom: behind the anti-people smuggling rhetoric”, was organised by the Refugee Action Collective Victoria to expose the rhetoric behind the government’s anti-people smuggling campaign.
In several places around world, students are rising up, fighting for their rights and demanding real change.
In Quebec, university students have mobilised in record numbers to oppose attacks on their education. The government of Premier Jean Charest plans to introduce a massive 75% hike in tertiary education fees — on the back of fee increases of C$100 a year for the past five years.
In response, 200,000 students and supporters marched to oppose the cuts on March 22. By March 29, about 300,000 students had gone on strike, boycotting their classes to protest the fee hikes.
This article first appeared in Tracker magazine on March 19.
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Aboriginal leaders in the Northern Territory have issued a strong warning that the Australian government’s new land grab in the form of the proposed 10-year extension of the intervention will send many communities into a dangerous downward spiral with still more death and misery.
A new report by an international research body has called for detention of refugee children to be outlawed and for all countries to “ensure the rights and liberty” of children affected by immigration detention.
Australian immigration detention figures released on March 25 showed that even after the federal government “completes” transferring children to “community detention”, hundreds of underage asylum seekers will stay in immigration detention centres.
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