Ali Jan travelled by donkey to the small village of Darwan, Afghanistan, to pick up flour and shoes for his six children on 10 September 2012. The next day, Australian special forces soldier Ben Roberts-Smith kicked him, handcuffed, off a cliff into the dry riverbed ten metres below. After Ali Jan survived the fall with severe injuries, Roberts-Smith ordered a subordinate soldier to shoot him dead.
It’s curious, to say the least: in 2015 Peter Collins—then head of international tax at the Australian branch of global consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)—was appointed to advise the federal government on a planned crackdown on multinational tax avoidance, and no-one seems to have thought there was a problem with that.
Wildfires are tearing through the Canadian province of Alberta, the heart of Canada’s lucrative oil and gas industry. The images of orange and black skies from the thick smoke—which is now billowing across the US border, causing air quality warnings in several northern states—are dystopian yet familiar.
I saw this wonderful play by Patricia Cornelius, currently on at Sydney Theatre Company, shortly after the news that 95-year-old Clare Nowland had died, a week after she was tasered by a cop at an aged care home in Cooma, New South Wales. As I sat in the Roslyn Packer Theatre, there were 471 active outbreaks of COVID in aged care homes across Australia.
The Victorian Socialists hosted a forum, Stop the Drive to War, at Melbourne’s Trades Hall on 3 June to try to build a coalition against the militarisation of Australia, the expansion of the nuclear industry, and the AUKUS deal and drive to war with China.
“I’m exhausted”, declared West Australian Premier Mark McGowan, announcing his resignation at a press conference on 29 May. So too are the state’s 40,000 nurses, who, under McGowan’s government, have confronted daily staff shortages, declining real wages and attacks on their union.
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Academic workers at Rutgers University in New Jersey have achieved a stunning victory with a serious campaign of industrial action, centred on an open-ended strike. Their approach is a model for unionists in Australia.
While most of us are being hit hard by the biggest cost of living crisis in a generation, Australia’s “big four” banks—Commonwealth, Westpac, ANZ and NAB—have had a record-breaking start to the financial year, posting a combined half-year profit of $17.1 billion. That’s a 19 percent increase from the equivalent period in 2021, and $1.3 billion more than the previous record of $15.8 billion in 2015.
“You’re just a performing fucking monkey”. A racist barb, and one of many pointed moments in Jacky, a Melbourne Theatre Company production currently playing at the Arts Centre. Jacky is about the politics of performing monkeys. It is about racism and exploitation, hypocrisy and resistance.
NTEU Fightback, a rank-and-file union group of the National Tertiary Education Union at the University of Sydney, is calling on staff to vote No in the upcoming ballot on the proposed enterprise agreement. The campaign was launched at a forum on 25 May, attended by over 50 people. A members’ meeting on 13 June will consider the agreement. This week will probably be the first time that members are provided with a full list of proposed changes to our working conditions.
The South Australian government has followed New South Wales and Victoria to undermine democratic rights. A bi-partisan bill has been rushed through parliament’s lower house, which proposes fines up to $50,000 or three months in jail if protesters “intentionally or recklessly obstruct the public place”.
A recent NBC News poll found that 70 percent of US voters don’t want Joe Biden to recontest the presidency next year. Sixty percent feel likewise about Donald Trump. Yet the two men are currently odds-on to face each other in a 2024 re-run of the 2020 presidential election.
Fifty years ago, the world witnessed the first strike for gay rights in one of the more unlikely places: among the leafy suburbs of northern Sydney at Macquarie University.
Allyship presents itself as a way that people can show support for the rights of an oppressed group that they themselves are not a part of without “taking the space” of those who are oppressed. Marxists, conversely, argue that solidarity is the key way we can win reforms for, and ultimately liberate, the oppressed. Allyship and solidarity might sound like much the same thing, but there are important differences in these strategies for social change.
We’ll need to bring a lot of industrial power to bear if we’re going to win the enterprise agreements we need. That means putting serious organising work into preparing for open-ended strikes.
Banksia Hill is a youth detention centre with an overwhelmingly Indigenous population and a notorious record of human rights violations. Detainees are regularly confined to their cells under “lockdown” conditions, which means that they are released from their tiny, suffocating rooms for only 10-30 minutes a day, as has been exposed by the ABC. One inmate spent 79 out of a total of 98 days in solitary confinement, according to Jesse Noakes in the Saturday Paper.
The mission statement of Universities Australia, the peak industry group for the sector, describes in lofty terms the purpose of universities: “For hundreds of years”, it reads, “universities have existed as institutions that seek to further human endeavour through the distribution of knowledge and the embodiment of the ideals of free inquiry, equality and independence”.
Australia is facing a full-blown housing emergency. House prices have been increasing faster than wages for decades, meaning that for many people, the prospect of ever owning a home is now vanishingly remote.