July 11, 2018 - click here for index of articles.

Childcare as commodity

The federal government has replaced the existing Child Care Rebate and the Child Care Benefit with the new, means-tested rebate known as the Child Care Subsidy. The government’s latest changes to early childhood education and care (ECEC) came into operation on July 2. This package of changes fails to address the present wage crisis in ECEC, to tighten the regulation of the system or address the lack of affordability. more ...

Editorial – Govpass to repression

The Department of Human Services is to become the federal government’s manager of digital identities after being selected to build the identity provider solution that will be used for the Govpass platform. more ...

Workers trapped in wage crisis

Some of Australia’s lowest-paid workers are facing a penalty rate cut – with the full force of the cuts still to come. The next 10 percentage point cut began from Sunday July 1 with another cut still to come in 12 months. more ...

East Timor – A very Australian coup

This background comes in light of the revelations exposed by whistleblower Witness K and his lawyer Bernard Collaery that Australia bugged the conference room of then East Timor government. They now face criminal prosecution for revealing the Australian government’s illegal actions in bugging the private government discussions of our East Timor neighbours. more ...

Deadly propaganda – The Pentagon and Hollywood

The Pentagon helps Hollywood to make money and, in turn, Hollywood churns out effective propaganda for the brutal American war machine. The US has the largest military budget in the world, spending over $611 billion – far larger than any other nation on Earth. The US military also has at their disposal the most successful propaganda apparatus the world has ever known ... Hollywood. more ...

Bernie of Mexico

This is Trump’s nightmare. I’m writing minutes after the victory of the Bernie Sanders of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Everyone calls him “Amlo.” more ...

Film Review – The First Purge

Horror movies frighten by playing on our fears of what could be lurking in the dark corners of our rooms or the unlit space under our beds. They tap into the imagination of things we’ve never seen and know are not real but are afraid of anyway. That’s the standard formula. But sometimes movies come along which are terrifying not for their monsters and ghouls, but because they hold up a mirror to the atrocities of our reality and paint a picture of future terror that’s not necessarily as fictional as we might hope. more ...

Child separation an American tradition

“Shit, my sister and cousin cried for days because of that. They were traumatised,” Leonard Peltier recalled, speaking of how he, his sister Betty Ann, and cousin Pauline Peltier were forcefully removed from his grandmother by the government and sent to boarding schools as children. more ...

Culture & Life – To bee or not to bee

Faced with a long-term crisis, beekeepers are demanding the support which will allow them to survive. The following is an interview by L’Humanité’s Marie-Noëlle Bertrand with Henri Clément, President of the National Union of French Beekeeping. more ...

Quote of the Week

Educate yourself because we will need all your intelligence.
Be excited because we will need all your enthusiasm.
Organise because we will need all your strength.