Pip Hinman

NSW Labor has anointed a new leader less than three months before the state election in March. With the ALP trailing Mike Baird's Coalition government in the polls, it must have calculated that it has nothing to lose by dumping former leader John Robertson.

Sharlene Leroy-Dyer is an Aboriginal woman who is standing for the Socialist Alliance for the Legislative Council in the March NSW state election. Green Left Weekly's Pip Hinman spoke to her about her interests and why she is standing.

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Sharlene Leroy-Dyer, an Aboriginal woman and descendant of the Wiradjuri and Dharug peoples of NSW, is heading the team for the Socialist Alliance ticket in the legislative council in the NSW state elections.

“I’m standing because neither a Labor nor a Liberal-National government can meet the needs of the community", Leroy-Dyer said.

Three years after Barry O'Farrell promised to ban coal seam gas (CSG) mining in Sydney's drinking water catchment, the NSW government’s gas plan says nothing about protecting this sensitive area.

The plan, aimed at defusing community anger about CSG approvals and mining in the lead up to the March state election, has done the opposite.

The University of Western Sydney Bankstown Resistance activists Mia Sanders and Ian Escandor have been elected to the Bankstown Student Campus Council (SCC) and the campus magazine CrUWSible editorial board. The results were announced on October 31.

Sanders told Green Left Weekly she believes students related to the “RES Out West” ticket because it emphasised fighting the federal government’s education attacks and rejecting discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people, women and refugees.

Progressive activists are contesting this year’s student campus council elections at the University of Western Sydney’s Bankstown campus.

RES Out West — Resisting Education Slashes — will run two activists for positions on the council and campus paper editors for 2015. Both are first year students and members of Resistance – Young Socialist Alliance.

Ian Escandor, also known as Esky, is a progressive hip-hop artist, community worker and student activist. He is studying Community Welfare and is active in the campaign to fight the education cuts on UWS Bankstown campus.

A meeting of about 200 union delegates and activists, organised by Unions NSW on September 17, unanimously supported a call for statewide action against the federal budget to defend jobs, workers’ rights and services.

Unionists concerned that Unions NSW was failing to lead a campaign against the budget attacks drafted the motion, which was moved from the floor. Initially, Unions NSW Secretary Mark Lennon told the group there would not be time to move the motion.

However, just before the meeting closed the motion was put to the vote and unanimously supported.

The NSW Coalition government will face pressure at the state election in March next year. The resignations of sitting Liberal MPs Tim Owen and Andrew Cornwell, after being investigated for alleged corruption by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), will likely trigger a byelection that could hand the seats to Labor.

After the corruption scandals under Labor rule, the Coalition were elected on the back of promises to “clean up” NSW politics. But the Coalition has now proved to be no better than the Labor Party.

Progressive activists are concerned about reported unprincipled deal-making in the upcoming elections for the new University of Sydney Student Representative Council.

The Sydney University student newspaper Honi Soit reported the Socialist Alternative Sydney University club had decided to support the ALP presidential candidate over the activist Grassroots presidential candidate in the upcoming elections.

Stop CSG Sydney has launched a campaign to extinguish the coal seam gas (CSG) exploration licence (PEL 463) covering most of metropolitan Sydney, home to about 4 million people.

The group formed in 2011 when residents discovered that Arrow Energy was about to drill at a waste site in the inner-west suburb of St Peters.

After more than two years of community campaigning, including mass petitions, marches and film screenings, the CSG company now known as Dart Energy claimed that it had never intended to drill at St Peters.

At the weekly meeting of Unions NSW, unionists handed an open letter to Secretary Mark Lennon, calling for it to organise another daytime mass delegates meeting of all unions following the July 6 “Bust the Budget” rally and to plan for a NSW-wide strike.

The letter also calls on Unions NSW to call a weekday stopwork protest against the budget and coordinate with the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and other state union peak bodies to turn this into a national day of action.