Green Left Fighting Fund

The mainstream media’s “impartial and balanced” fig leaves began to slip on January 31, revealing their corporate genitalia for all to see. Australia’s richest person, billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart, had begun buying more shares in Fairfax Media, increasing her stake towards 15% and raising questions about media impartiality. Fairfax journalists scrambled to report the news, tying themselves in knots over how much to admit about the corporate nature of their media outlets and whether Rinehart could have any influence on editorial input.

Happy New Year and thank you to all our supporters. You helped us raise $203,200 for our 2011 Fighting Fund. This is a great effort, even though we made only 81% of our target of $250,000. The big upsurge in political activity — spurred on by the “Arab Spring” revolts and the Occupy and Indignado movements — probably meant that less activist time was available for fundraising. But it also made the Green Left project even more significant.

Tahrir (“Liberation”) Square in Cairo was the birthplace of hope for millions if not billions of people this year. It was here that the Egyptian people launched a mighty democratic revolution, writes Peter Boyle.

I will come straight to the point. We are rapidly coming to the end of the year and we still need to raise $59,536 to meet Green Left Weekly’s $250,000 Fighting Fund target for the year. Our supporters have raised $190,424 so far this year, but we need an extraordinary effort in the rest of November and December to make our target. GLW is a people-powered independent media project. We go against the stream in a society where public debate is dominated by the slick, self-serving corporate media.

Nurses in Victoria are being threatened with an Alan Joyce-style lockout because they have campaigned for a modest 3.5% pay rise (just to keep up with the rising cost of living), superannuation and overtime improvements, and keeping patient-to-nurse ratios. Australia’s four big banks, meanwhile, have announced a combined annual profit of $24.4 billion, up 12% from $21.7 billion a year ago. This speaks volumes about the grossly distorted priorities in our society.

The ABC’s Q & A program on October 24 was the first to discuss the Occupy movement sweeping the world. Reportedly there are now occupations in 2200 cities. It revealed why the politicians that represent the richest 1% have no credibility any more.

Recent polls in Australia now show that Kevin Rudd is the preferred prime minister of 44% of those surveyed, but the guy is just another right-wing creep swanning around the world, giving the world unsolicited advice in Ruddese while living it up in presidential hotel suites costing up to $2700 a night.

This is a country in serious denial. Australia is a world leader in per capita greenhouse gas pollution and in fossil fuel exports. It produces 30 tonnes CO₂-equivalent a person a year and 54 tonnes if Australia’s exported CO₂ pollution is included. Pakistan produces 0.9 tonnes and Somalia produces 0.1 tonnes. Yet in these two countries people are dying from climate change as we speak.

When Liberal leader Tony Abbott promised in the last federal election campaign that the notorious anti-worker “Work Choices” laws of the former Howard Liberal-National government were “dead, buried and cremated” very few people believed him.

Putrajaya, the seat of Malaysia’s federal government, was built for more than US$8 billion as a fantasy project of the country’s former PM and strongman Mohamed Mahathir. It was carved out of rubber plantation-covered hills in the 1990s and turned into a planned city for public servants. Many buildings were designed to look like palaces — with an eclectic mix of styles from around the world — giving the city the look of a sprawling, but spookily empty, theme park.

The “free market” fanatics at the Productivity Commission have done their dirty job once again with their newly released Caring For Older Australians report. It would be more honestly titled Throw The Oldies To The Wolves because it follows vicious cuts to disabilities pensions.

The double meaning in the popular slogan “White Australia has a black history”, sadly, still applies to federal, state and territory government policies. Governments may have apologised for past mistreatment but they are still destroying Aboriginal communities and stealing Aboriginal land. Official racism is as alive as ever. The Gillard Labor government’s Ministry of Truth must be working overtime to churn out titles for programs that say the opposite of what they actually deliver.