Throughout the battle against the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL), the US$3.78 billion pipeline that will carry about 500,000 barrels of oil a day, indigenous campaigners and supporters repeatedly warned it was not a question of if, but when a breach would occur.
Now, before the pipeline is even fully operational, those warnings have come to fruition.
Australia’s largest milk processor Murray Goulburn has announced it will close manufacturing plants in three small rural towns: Kiewa and Rochester in northern Victoria and Edith Creek in Tasmania.
Murray Goulburn expects 360 people will lose their jobs. The closures are in areas where there are no other industries.
This will have a huge impact on these three local communities. The 700 residents of Kiewa-Tangambalanga will lose 135 jobs from Murray Goulburn's factory closure.
The Anti-Poverty Network South Australia released the statement below on its Facebook page on May 10 in response to the federal budget, which included a series of attacks on welfare recipients.
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The staff and volunteers at Green Left Weekly send warm solidarity greetings to Fairfax workers taking strike action against the drastic job cuts being pushed by management.
We applaud you for taking this action — deemed illegal by this country’s draconian anti-union laws.
You are setting an example of what breaking bad laws is all about: protecting people’s livelihoods and standing up for your right to a well-paid job.
Italian Democratic Party (PD) members re-elected former prime minister Matteo Renzi as party secretary with 70% of the votes in primaries on April 30. Renzi’s re-election carries important significance for both Italy and Europe.
More than 2000 Honduran campesinos have taken over 10 farms in La Lima belonging to the Tela Railroad Company, a successor to the dissolved United Fruit Company, La Prensa reported on May 3.
The campesinos, demanding better working conditions and health care from the company, vowed to indefinitely occupy the space until they take action.
The federal government is spending up to $18.9 million to trial the cashless welfare card for 1850 people.
Former Greens leader Bob Brown and Hobart nurse Jessica Hoyt began a landmark High Court challenge to Tasmania's draconian anti-protest laws on May 2. The 2014 legislation allows police to stop protests before they even begin on business premises and access areas.
The two were arrested for peaceably protesting against the logging of the Lapoinya State Forest near Burnie on Tasmania’s north-west coast in January last year. Police dropped the charges against Brown and Hoyt after they began their High Court challenge.
About 300 people rallied outside the Queen Victoria Market on April 28 to protest the City of Melbourne’s $250 million plans to “redevelop” the market as an entertainment space and gourmet food precinct.
The council bought a prime piece of land next to the market in 2014 for $76 million. It then sold it to developer PDG for $33 million which plans to build a 200 metre high-rise tower. The council plans to use the cash to fund the redevelopment.
Say what you will about the members of the Coalition government, but they have principles and they stick to them. In particular, the principle of working to destroy this godforsaken Hellhole of a planet as rapidly as humanly possible.
And so when, amid a growing campaign against Adani’s proposed Carmichael coalmine in Queensland, Westpac ruled out funding the mega-mine project, federal resources minister Matt Canavan did not hold back.
Today’s crisis of the established political parties and the rise of far-right political projects are linked to the long-running capitalist crisis in which neoliberalism is immiserating the working class and small producers.
Thousands of submissions are being written across NSW opposing oil and gas giant Santos’s environmental impact statement (EIS) for its Narrabri Gas Project in the Pilliga. Before the May 22 deadline, thousands more will be written.
If the community’s views are heard, Santos’ plan to drill 850 coal seam gas (CSG) wells at 425 sites in and around the Pilliga State Forest near Narrabri — covering an area of about 1000 hectares — will be canned.