Analysis

Charges against Izhar Ul-Haque have been dropped after a judge found on November 12 that ASIO officers had deliberately committed the offences of false imprisonment and kidnapping. This comes after a series of abusive charges against several people, with a senior police officer saying that police were instructed to charge as many people as possible to test the limits of new terrorism legislation.

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. In the years following the revolution, its leaders initiated the formation of the Communist (Third) International (Comintern), an international grouping of communist parties. In Venezuela, the leadership of the country’s unfolding socialist revolution have issued a call for a new international of Latin American left parties. In this article, part of a series on the early years of the Comintern, John Riddell looks at the role of the International in developing revolutionary workers’ parties.

Come Saturday night, most political parties in Australia will be winding up their public campaigning until the next elections. The rank-and-file members who did their stint of letterboxing and polling booth duty will mostly retreat into inactivity, leaving “politics” once again to the professional politicians. No wonder so many people are cynical about politics — in their experience, it’s about politicians doing it by themselves and largely for themselves.

The Climate Change Coalition is a new political party. Green Left Weekly’s Zane Alcorn spoke to CCC candidate Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, who is running for the Senate in New South Wales.

KERRY NETTLE has been a NSW Greens senator since 2001. She spoke to Green Left Weekly’s PIP HINMAN about what the Greens had achieved, and why it was critical that they hold the balance of power in the new Senate.

The idea that we build something much better than capitalism had been around for generations but, 90 years ago in Russia, for the first time an alliance of workers and peasants made a revolution that was to frame the course of history ever since.

The following appeal for solidarity with the Pakistani people’s struggle for democracy has been initiated by Melbourne civil liberties lawyer Rob Stary.

No housing crisis in la-la land Writing in the Australian Financial Review, former Labor leader Mark Latham opines that the "housing crisis" is completely manufactured, a creation of people who are having trouble upgrading from two- to three-car

For two years 13 Muslim men from Melbourne, have been held in Barwon prison near Geelong and nine men from Sydney in Goulburn’s super-max prison without trial.

Labor leader Kevin Rudd and IR spokesperson Julia Gillard have fallen into the trap set for them by PM John Howard. By accepting the need to crack down on unionists in order to make Labor look respectable to big business, Rudd and Gillard have given credibility to the Coalition’s witch-hunt about “the union threat to the economy”.

What about your preferences? At its November 1 meeting the Socialist Alliance national executive decided its recommendation on preference flows for "above-the-line" voting for the Senate. It also urged all SA House of Representatives campaigns to

“When Ken Fry came back from a funeral several years ago he complained that one of the speakers ’went on about the bloke as though he was a blessed saint … I hope they don’t go on about me like that when I go …’.”