Socialist Alliance

Lines of grey muttering faces, masked with fear, They leave their trenches, going over the top, While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists, And hope, with furtive eyes and grasping fists, Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop! — Siegfried Sassoon. Implausible as it might seem, it was the violent protest of a group of Bosnian high school students that sparked World War I.

The far right Islamophobic “Reclaim Australia” movement burst onto the streets in what was the biggest racist mobilisation since the Cronulla riots, in 16 places across Australia on April 4.

Workers in the South Australian retail sector — particularly young, casual workers — could lose their penalty rates thanks to a deal between retail employers and the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA).

Socialist Alliance has welcomed support from the NSW CFMEU Construction Division for its state election campaign. The union recently voted to donate $5000 to the campaign and profiled a Socialist Alliance Upper House candidate, CFMEU member and mobile crane operator Howard Byrnes, in its latest union journal Unity.

This NSW election, like the Victorian and Queensland polls before it, hinges on growing public opposition to Tony Abbott’s federal government and the neoliberal policies implemented by Labor and Coalition state governments. The sell-off of public assets and services, cuts to the public sector, unsustainable development, mining and unprecedented handouts and tax cuts to corporate interests and the super rich are now standard practice, and people have had enough.

The Socialist Alliance released this statement on March 12. *** "The state government's plan to privatise the power industry’s 'poles and wires' would be a disaster for the people of NSW," Duncan Roden, Socialist Alliance candidate for the Legislative Council in the March 28 state elections, said on March 12. "The sell-off would be an economic and political setback for the public interest, and a windfall hand-out to former merchant banker [and now Premier] Mike Baird's big business mates.

Several commentators have pointed out that treasurer Joe Hockey's Intergenerational Report is a partisan document designed to bash Labor over the head.

I am a political science student, two years into a bachelor degree at the University of Western Sydney. I major in Social and Cultural Analysis. I am also an activist, I campaign day-to-day on campus and on the streets, talking to students and workers. I am a young, unemployed, queer woman and activist from a working-class family. I am not the typical Legislative Council candidate — but that is exactly why I’m standing. Through my candidacy, I seek to actively challenge the notion that the 1% represents the 99%, or that you should be forced to vote for the “lesser evil”.

Blink and you might have missed it, but February 27 was the “Great Debate” between Luke Foley and Mike Baird. The media reported that Premier Baird handed Labor’s Foley his election slogan, because Baird has no plan B for infrastructure without the electricity sell-off to fund $20 billion in projects.

If Tony Abbott’s government has its way, new laws further empowering Australia's secret police to greatly expand their mass surveillance powers will be rammed through federal parliament by mid-March. But it will succeed only if the Australian Labor Party backs the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill.

Bellicose and racist jingoism is the last refuge of scoundrel Prime Minister Tony Abbott. His February 23 “National Security Statement” was blatant incitement of hatred, bigotry and suspicion against Australia's Muslim minority.

As the federal government lurches from crisis to crisis, the hand-wringing and finger pointing in the mainstream press continues. A piece by Murdoch mouthpiece Janet Albrechtsen published in the Australian on February 18, blames the Australian public. Titled “We, the people, are the threat to fiscal reform”, Albrechtsen continues the conservative mantra that argues that government budget debt is intergenerational theft.