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In late July, a Four Corners investigative report, titled Australia’s Shame, exposed the brutal abuse of Aboriginal youth in the Don Dale Juvenile Detention Centre in Darwin. Kids were routinely held in isolation for weeks at a time in cells with no running water and little natural light. Graphic CCTV footage showed six teens being doused with ten bursts of noxious tear gas in less than two minutes. One of them, Dylan Voller, was just 13 years old. The restraint chairs and spit hoods, used to restrain children, were reminiscent of Guantanamo Bay.

“I’m back — but not alone.” Pauline Hanson, leader of the extreme-right One Nation party, made a parliamentary comeback in Australia’s federal election this past July. These taunting words are from her “maiden” speech to Parliament on September 15.

In 1996 Hanson was elected to the House of Representatives, but lost her seat two years later. Back then, she said Asians were taking over the country. Twenty years later, she warns, “Now we are in danger of being swamped by Muslims”—who, she claims, will commit terror and impose sharia law.

On June 30, it will be three years since most public servants got their last pay increase. Meanwhile, the cost of living continues to rise and workers face jobs cuts at every turn. But it is not only workloads that are increasing. The anger and determination of members of the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) also continues to grow. Workers are determined not to accept agreements with weakened conditions and pathetic pay offers. The Coalition government’s bargaining framework is one big mess.

In an atmosphere of Islamophobic hysteria, applications for building mosques in Australia have become a lightening rod for the far right. In Victoria it started in 2012, when the rabidly anti-Muslim, evangelical Christian Danny Nalliah railed against (but failed to prevent) a mosque being built next to his own Catch the Fire Ministries in Doveton on Melbourne’s outskirts. Nalliah claimed that mosques are breeding grounds for terrorists.