Riz Wakil, an Afghan refugee, arrived on Ashmore Reef in 1999 and was held in Curtin detention centre for nine months. Now a permanent Australian resident, he runs a printery.
In June 2010, GetUp! won a charity auction prize — a surfing lesson with opposition leader Tony Abbott — and donated it to Wakil. Abbott and Wakil finally met for the surf lesson on May 8.
Green Left Weekly’s Rachel Evans spoke to Wakil about the encounter and Australia’s refugee system.
What did Abbott say during the lesson?
Analysis
The proposal for a carbon tax raises the issues of tax equity and political strategy. Yet despite their inter-relatedness, we need to disentangle these issues to focus on the original question.
As a mean of addressing climate change, the carbon tax proposal comes in the context of difficult global negotiations, where almost any proposal has been seen as a breakthrough, and where (after the last financial derivatives bubble) there is justified suspicion of emissions trading schemes.
The Australian media, collectively, does a dismal job of telling the story of our silent apartheid, the space between black and white Australians.
The new assimilation, well underway in the Northern Territory, has the same intent as government policies of past eras, still aiming to change Aboriginal people, restrict the importance of their law, language and cultural practice, and move many from their ancestral lands into new housing estates that, we are promised, will materialise magically in great little Aussie growth towns.
Climate scientist Will Steffen told reporters at the May 23 launch of The Critical Decade — the first report from the federal government-appointed Climate Commission — that “we don’t have the luxury anymore of climate denialism” and “need to get beyond this fruitless, phoney debate in the media”.
And straight away, the Coalition began a fruitless, phoney debate about the report in the media.
Bob Gould was a veteran of the labour left in Australia. He died on May 22, at the age of 74, of injuries suffered after a fall in his well-known bookshop, Gould's Book Arcade, in Newtown, Sydney.
He had been unwell for some time, but his accidental death was untimely.
Gould was a member of the early Australian Trotskyist group active in the 1950s and 1960s, along with Nick Origlass and others, who fought for socialist politics within the Australian Labor Party and against the Stalinism of the Communist Party of Australia.
The crowd at Harry Black’s funeral, on May 23, filled the South Chapel in Rookwood Garden Cemetery, the overflow room and the upstairs gallery. Family, comrades, wharfies, seafarers and even a few old fellow soldiers from World War II were there to say goodbye.
It was a fitting reflection on the life of a treasured comrade.
Harry was born in Rylstone, NSW, the son of a butcher in a small rural town, said Jim Donovan, the president of the Retired Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) Members, in his eulogy at the funeral.
Many people have heard of the mess the government & Lend Lease are up to at Barangaroo, but little has yet to be made public on a similar development for the Gosford Waterfront Landing.
The General Manager of the Central Coast Regional Development Corporation Brett Phillips says the “CCRDC is indicating high end uses for the site along the lines of commercial office space, high end tourism and business related facilities and performing arts”.
Right wing media commentator Andrew Bolt launched his new interview show The Bolt Report on Channel 10 on May 8 with a classic display of the use of phony statistics.
Interviewing Afghan refugee Riz Wakil, Bolt claimed that a five-year long survey of Afghan migrants showed “something like 94% are on Centrelink benefits, only 9% actually are employed”.
The illegal eavesdropping on famous people by the Rupert Murdoch-owned British tabloid News of the World is said to be Murdoch’s Watergate. But is it the crime by which Murdoch ought to be known?
In his native land, Australia, Murdoch controls 70% of the capital city press. Australia is the world’s first “murdochracy”, in which smear by media is power.
The most enduring and insidious Murdoch campaign has been against the Aboriginal people, who were dispossessed by the arrival of the British in the late 18th century and have never been allowed to recover.
Yes, I am a feminist and I will be joining the Melbourne “SlutWalk” on May 28, and I hope you will too! And, yes, I still cringe every time I mention the infamous word SlutWalk and my desire of wanting to be there, right in the middle of it.
Three Australian activists will take part in the Freedom Flotilla 2, the successor to the first Freedom Flotilla to Gaza in May 2010 that was brutally attacked in international waters by Israeli commandos.
Green Left Weekly’s Pip Hinman asked former NSW Greens parliamentarian Sylvia Hale why she has joined the Australian contingent on the flotilla.
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The Socialist Party of Malaysia (PSM) and the Socialist Alliance issued the joint statement below on May 19.
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The Socialist Party of Malaysia (PSM) and the Socialist Alliance in Australia denounce the recent agreement made between the governments of Malaysia and Australia, whereby Australia will send 800 asylum seekers who have been detained by Australian authorities to Malaysia in exchange for 4000 refugees currently in Malaysia.
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