Since 2004, a mass mobilisation of popular support for marriage equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) people has gained momentum, and now a possible victory is in sight.
But sadly, marriage equality would not mean an end to homophobia or transphobia in Australia.
Lurking behind Australia’s marriage ban is an even more sinister injustice clothed in the language of religious tolerance.
Analysis
With the betting agencies putting the Greens candidate ahead of Labor in Sydney's inner west seat of Marrickville, Labor is running scared.
But rather than debate the issues, the ALP machine is doing its best to smear the Greens.
At a 120-strong candidates' meeting hosted by the Newtown Neighbourhood Centre on February 23, Greens candidate and Marrickville Mayor Fiona Byrne was asked if she would agree to council “boycotting China” if asked to do so by a Tibetan constituent.
The underlying issue of racism in Australia has been a pervasive feature of national political life ever since the invasion of the First Fleet in 1788.
It was used as an ideological justification for the dispossession of indigenous Australians.
In 1975, the Racial Discrimination Act was implemented in order to enable all Australians, regardless of their racial and cultural background, to enjoy equal rights and to prohibit discriminative behaviour based on racial hatred.
Mining company BHP Billiton’s whopping $10.5 billion profit for the second half of 2010 highlights the shameless greed of those making a fortune out of Australia’s valuable resources.
Remember the tantrum thrown by BHP, Rio Tinto and Xstrata less than a year ago after then-PM Kevin Rudd proposed the Resource Super Profits Tax (RSPT)?
The RSPT wasn’t a radical proposal. Part of the revenue from the modest 40% tax would have been returned to the corporate sector, helping to fund a cut in the already low corporate tax rate and various subsidies to mining.
The Socialist Alliance released the statement below on February 26.
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The Socialist Alliance extends its full solidarity to the people of Libya now being brutally repressed for demanding an end to the corrupt and unjust regime of dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
Their courageous struggle, launched on February 15, for democracy and economic and social justice, has resulted in hundreds, if not thousands, of people being killed.
David Hicks was one of the first “war on terror” detainees to be sent to the US military prison at Guantanamo the day it opened in January 2002.
In a February 16 article, Truth-out.org’s Jason Leopold introduced Hicks as “the Australian drifter who converted to Islam, changed his name to Muhammed Dawood and ended up at training camps in Afghanistan the US government said were linked to al-Qaeda, one of which was visited by Osama bin Laden several times.
On March 8, women’s rights campaigners around the world will celebrate the 100th International Women’s Day (IWD).
There could be no more fitting testament to the meaning of IWD than the words of one of the thousands of Egyptian women who joined the democracy protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo last month. The people’s struggle to be rid of dictator Hosni Mubarak, she said, is also a struggle for women’s rights: "[Before] we had nothing, now I guess we will take everything."
IWD was born in a time of great social turbulence and huge struggles by ordinary people for a better life.
Many millions of tonnes of coal have been exported since activists dubbed the Rising Tide Seven temporarily shut down coal loaders in Newcastle in September last year.
They were convicted on January 31 of “remaining on enclosed lands”. Each was fined $300, plus $79 in court costs.
However, on March 3, they were vindicated when magistrate Elaine Truscott rejected the Port Waratah Coal Services’ (PWCS) $525,000 “compensation” claim.
The federal government’s expansion of income management in the Northern Territory has created new barriers for Aboriginal people who want to get off its welfare control scheme.
The rollout has also affected hundreds — possibly thousands — of others, including residents of Darwin and Alice Springs and newly arrived refugees.
“I am a black South African, and if I were to change the names, the description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank would be a description of what is happening in South Africa” - Archbishop Desmond Tutu, New York 1989.
When Desmond Tutu made this comment, the South African apartheid regime was still in power. In 1994, after 45 years of racial segregation, the apartheid era was officially over.
Climate research group Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE) has released a briefing paper for the NSW elections. It outlines the proposals for NSW in the Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Stationary Energy Plan (ZCA2020) — a plan to transition Australia to 100% renewable energy within 10 years, using commercially available technologies.
ZCA2020 was launched last year around Australia, gaining widespread attention.
It showed that the transition to renewables is technologically possible. Further, it put a price of about 3% of GDP on the transition to 100% renewables in 10 years.
Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu announced on March 1 that the government would push ahead with the unpopular plan to build Australia’s largest desalination plant in Wonthaggi.
This is despite pre-election promises that he would re-examine the contract with Aquasure, the private consortium commissioned to build and operate the plant, which was approved under Labor premier John Brumby in 2007.
According to the Age on March 1, the eventual price tag is "$24 billion that is expected to double household water bills over the next five years".
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