Analysis

The problem is obvious to anyone who uses public transport — in Sydney or any other major city in Australia. Public transport networks, designed in the 1940s, are straining to service growing cities.
Eighteen-year-old South African athlete Caster Semenya has done nothing wrong. Yet she has been accused of deceiving the world about her gender. There is nothing wrong with Semenya’s body. Yet her body has been paraded in front of the world by the mass media as if she were a sideshow freak.
Over September 12-13, more than 400 people travelled to the Hazelwood coal-fired power station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley to send a clear message: “Switch off Hazelwood, switch on renewables.”
In early September, as federal parliamentarians debated whether to end the repulsive government policy of charging refugees for the costs of their own imprisonment in detention centres, damning revelations emerged that Australian navy personnel prevented badly burnt refugees from climbing onto rescue boats.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS), often touted as “clean coal”, has been promoted by the coal industry and governments such as Australia and the US as a way to cut emissions from coal-fired energy generation, in order to avoid dangerous climate change.
Our neighbours recently moved out. They could no longer afford the rent on their small two-bedroom inner-city terrace, so moved away from the city centre to reduce their rent by $100.
Thousands of staff from 16 universities across the country will strike on September 16 for new union collective agreements. The actions follow strikes at the University of New England and Charles Sturt University on September 9 and at Victorian and Tasmanian campuses on May 21.
Aboriginal Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma released the Our Future in Our Hands report to the National Press Club on August 27. It outlined a proposed structure for a new national body to represent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Since April this year, a young Cairns couple has faced a nightmare.
Federal resources minister Martin Ferguson responded to the disastrous August 21 oil spill off the north-west coast of Australia by proposing to set up a new investigative body. The September 7 announcement claimed the new body would have the power to investigate such oil spillages and to “stop it happening again”.
On September 8, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) notified the families of the five journalists killed in 1975 at Balibo in East Timor that it had begun an investigation into the killings.
The following call for support was released on August 24 by Richard Downs, spokesperson of the Alyawarr people of the Northern Territory, who have walked off their community of Ampilatwatja in protest against the federal government’s NT intervention. Visit www.interventionwalkoff.wordpress.com for more information.