Analysis

The Business Council of Australia (BCA) — representing Australia’s largest 100 corporations — has called for a higher consumption tax and for the company tax to be halved. It did so in a submission to the federal government’s review of taxation (the Henry review) made public on June 14

“Tasers are not the ’non-lethal’ weapons the QPS [Queensland Police Service] leadership claims”, former state MP and former police officer Peter Pyke told the media in April. He predicted a Queenslander would die in 2009 from a Taser.

The NSW budget was handed down on June 16. NSW state treasurer Eric Roozendaal tried to spin it as a “beacon of hope” for the state.

In May, visiting US ecologist Bill McKibben spoke at a packed forum at the University of Sydney. He put a compelling case for emergency action on climate change. In short, we must act now and act decisively. Otherwise the planet will become uninhabitable.

“I would have been concerned if it was a dog or some other animal who died in those conditions, but since it was only a black-fella …”

The Rudd government will send a 40-member delegation, led by deputy prime minister Julia Gillard, to an “Australia Israel Leadership Forum” in Jerusalem on June 25-26. The government’s decision is yet further confirmation of its desire to outdo the former Howard government in blind support for Israel.

Despite widespread opposition, forest giant Gunns Ltd is still pressing ahead with its proposed pulp mill in the pristine Tamar Valley in northern Tasmania. But the campaign against it shows no signs of going away.

We would have loved for them to be bigger, but the June 13 national climate rallies were an unmistakable step forward for the climate action movement. More than 11,000 rallied nationally, making them the largest climate actions yet in the era of PM Kevin Rudd.

Saharawi refugee and preschool teacher Fetim Sellami is a central character in the Australian documentary Stolen, a film set in the refugee camps in south-west Algeria that have been home to 165,000 Saharawi refugees since their country, Western Sahara, was invaded by Morocco in 1975. However, when she and her husband, Baba Hocine Mahfoud, attended its June 11 premiere at the Sydney Film Festival, they did not receive red carpet treatment, despite the long distance they had travelled.

On May 29, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told radio 3AW that his government has “absolutely no plans to make any change” to the superannuation preservation age — the age at which workers may access the superannuation paid into a super fund by their employer.

On May 31 in Melbourne, 5000 angry students marched against the increasing number of violent attacks on Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi students.

Recent protests by Indian students in Australia have drawn global attention to a resurgence of racist violence in Australian cities. An Indian student lies in a Melbourne hospital recovering from serious stab wounds to his abdomen, while others live in terror.