Analysis

The documentary film Stolen is now largely discredited. It has been in the press recently for its controversial claim that slavery still exists among Saharawis in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara.

He occupied a (somewhat self-appointed) position as a hero of Australia’s environment and Indigenous rights movements for decades. Yet these days, former Midnight Oil frontman and current ALP environment minister Peter Garrett works overtime to prove his credentials as a defender of big business and the big polluters.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) sent the open letter below to Melbourne International Film Festival on July 5.

July 7 proved to be an excellent day for the Australian business community. Citing the economic downturn as a key factor in his decision, Fair Pay Commissioner Ian Harper announced that there will be no increase the minimum wage.

Indigenous Affairs minister Jenny Macklin was advised by her department against formally consulting with Aboriginal people over the compulsory acquisition of their land because it would be too expensive, tie up too many resources, and was unlikely to get the outcome the government wanted, leaked documents reveal.

If we had a solar thermal power plant for every time a world summit has declared a “historic consensus” on climate change, we’d be well on the way to winning a safe climate. Unfortunately, the only consensus to emerge from the recent Group of Eight (G8) summit in Italy was to talk big on climate action while doing practically nothing about it.

A boat carrying 74 asylum seekers disappeared en route to Australia near the Komodo island in Indonesia last week. The boat was believed to have women and children on board and had vanished — feared to have sunk — when the Australian Federal Police was notified by a refugee rights advocate, Ian Rintoul, on July 7.

The article below is based on a speech given by Simon Butler as chair of the Sydney Climate Emergency Rally on June 13. Butler is also a member of the Socialist Alliance.

Mr Ward and police brutality Last year's death of Aboriginal elder Mr Ward in the back of a prison van is the tip of a larger problem, which those who say "it must never happen again" actually avoid looking at. The problem is exposed by a

Public broadcaster ABC has entered into a controversial joint venture with Australia’s largest regional commercial television network, WIN TV, to run the ABC’s master control centre to send out television and radio signals. WIN TV’s transmission spans the largest geographical area in the world, reaching more than 5.2 million viewers across Australia.

In his notorious Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler explained the political device of the big lie:

>Graham Brown is a retired coalminer and climate change activist. He’s also a member of the Upper Hunter Greens in NSW, and is helping build a union and community alliance aimed at creating a “just transition” to a carbon-neutral economy. Such a transition would ensure workers in the coal industry move into alternative employment. Green Left Weekly’s Zane Alcorn spoke to Brown, and this is the first of three parts of the interview.