Analysis

Love Andrew Bolt or loathe him, you’ve got to admit the right-wing Herald Sun columnist and radio shock jock is a master of the ambush interview. Add in Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott’s slipperiness with any kind of truth — scientific, political or otherwise — and you have a media product so toxic it deserves to be trucked off for incineration by people in respirator suits. Unfortunately, that’s the product that was all over the talkback airwaves and parliamentary reports for several days at the end of March.

I read an article by Greg Sheridan on multiculturalism in the April 2 Weekend Australian and there are a few points that need to be said. First of all, Sheridan says he sees no future to multiculturalism. He says it is a failure and that it doesn't work in Australia. Well, I believe that we live in a world where borders are less important than ever before.

If you 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. — South African anti-apartheid campaigner and Nobel Peace Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 1989

Michael Arnold was born in country Victoria. He became politically active in Perth when he was 15. This was when he joined the socialist youth organisation Resistance and the Democratic Socialist Party. When he was in his twenties, Arnold became active in the Harm Reduction Movement. He set up Rave Safe in Melbourne in the 1990s and produced a magazine called Flying Frequencies for the Harm Reduction Movement. Arnold was also active in community radio, producing a program for Harm Reduction on 3CR Community Radio, and being a DJ on PBS.

The online journal Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal is hosting a series of commentaries from left-wing groups and commentators from around the world on the crucial question of whether or not to support the US-NATO military intervention in Libya.

A vicious smear campaign against the Greens candidate for Marrickville Fiona Byrne in the NSW state election reveals just how worried the powers-that-be are about the prospect of the NSW Greens winning a lower house seat.

Writing in the aftermath of the several high profile WikiLeaks publications including the Collateral Murder video and the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs, News Corporation journalist Brad Norington set out on a crusade against online media, and more specifically, against WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.

Rob Stary, an Australian lawyer representing WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, spoke to the WikiLeaks Australian Citizens Alliance on February 4. In the interview below, Stary discusses the persecution of WikiLeaks and the failure of the Australian government to uphold Assange’s rights.

Manufacturer BlueScope Steel has been at the forefront of the campaign against the carbon price proposed by Labor and the Greens. Chief Executive Paul O'Malley has argued it could spell “the end of steel manufacturing in Australia”; something the Opposition Leader Tony Abbott agreed with during a recent tour of BlueScope's steelworks in Port Kembla. Both have said that a price on carbon would threaten the company's profitability and therefore force operations offshore in search of cheaper labour.

At the Bali Process summit held on March 30, immigration minister Chris Bowen and foreign affairs minister Kevin Rudd signed a “regional framework to prevent people smuggling” with 41 nations. But they failed to bully East Timor into agreeing to an Australian detention centre on its soil. Rudd said the agreement — ultimately intended to stop asylum seekers reaching Australia — “represents a significant win” for Australia. Bowen said it “lays a framework for further bilateral discussions” with East Timor.

Environment Tasmania (ET), the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and The Wilderness Society (TWS) launched television and radio advertisements on March 30 that call for an end to logging in native forests. The ads feature University of Tasmania biologist Peter McQuillan, who says: “We need government to implement the agreed forest solution”.

Modern ALP is a joke I’m writing to comment on the interview with Andrew Ferguson in GLW #872. Was this a joke or fair dinkum? Ferguson (and the dynasty he comes from) seems to me to represent everything that is wrong with the ALP. Another union boss who never worked in the industry in which he was supposed to represent construction workers (three weeks or something as a stonemasons’ labourer ain’t what I call experience in everyday battling to survive).