Daniel Andrews, in one of his last acts as Victorian premier, announced that Melbourne’s 44 public housing towers will be demolished. In an audacious giveaway to developers, the sites will be opened up to private development.
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price could well become as synonymous with the far right as Pauline Hanson. Four weeks out from the referendum on the Voice, she cemented her position as one of Australia’s leading white supremacists with her comments at the National Press Club about how colonisation has been a wonderful thing for Aboriginal people. She railed against “separatism” (any acknowledgement that Aboriginal people are oppressed) and implored people to recognise that Aboriginal disadvantage is not due to racism but is the result of something “much closer to home”.
Dan Andrews, who has just resigned after nine years as Victorian premier, was probably the most controversial Labor leader since Gough Whitlam or indeed Jack Lang. Andrews was detested by the right as “Dictator Dan”, a man out to destroy all the “freedoms” so beloved by arch reactionaries and libertarians, such as the right of business owners to put profits above basic health measures.
Two record-breaking union meetings at Melbourne University have voted overwhelmingly for another week-long strike, starting on 2 October.
“Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Zero!”
A couple of weeks ago, Marcia Langton—usually one of the more conservative voices in Indigenous politics—became overnight a figure of hatred for Australia’s frothing right-wing journalists and politicians. Why? Because she said something mind-numbingly obvious about the upcoming referendum: “Every time the No cases raise their arguments, if you start pulling it apart you get down to base racism—I’m sorry to say that's where it lands—or sheer stupidity”.
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Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek last week welcomed a UNESCO World Heritage Committee decision not to list the Great Barrier Reef as “in danger”. But what is “great news” to Plibersek is not great news for the reef.
Refugee women desperate for visas are walking 650km from the office of Immigration Minister Andrew Giles in Melbourne to Parliament House in Canberra.
Chants of “Black, Indigenous, Arab, Asian and white—unite, unite, unite to fight the right!” echoed across the streets of Sunshine West on Saturday, when 500 anti-fascist activists and local community members gathered to protest against Legacy Boxing Gym.
Hundreds of refugees rallied outside Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil’s office in Oakleigh, in south-east Melbourne, on Monday, demanding permanent visas for those who have still not gained protection more than a year after the election of the federal Labor government.
If decisions in Australia were made by people with common sense rather than business-loving pro-capitalist sycophants, Qantas would be nationalised. The company has repeatedly made headlines since the beginning of the pandemic for a variety of attacks on its workers and customers.
The murder of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police last September sparked the largest revolt in Iran since the 1979 revolution. What began as a protest in Gina Mahsa Amini’s home town of Saqqez soon developed into a nationwide revolt against the Iranian state. Over the course of six months, hundreds of thousands of students, workers, the young and the old, took to the streets with the battle cry “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi!” (Women, life, freedom).
Large demonstrations have been taking place across Syria in recent weeks. While their scale has yet to reach the peaks seen in 2011, many are hopeful that the government will be brought down. To get a more detailed assessment of the movement and the situation it faces in Syria, Red Flag spoke to long-time Syrian leftist Jamal Chamma. Jamal is based in Melbourne and has been involved for years in organising demonstrations in solidarity with the Syrian revolution.
Australia’s goods and services tax is the one tax that the rich in this country love.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers claimed last week that the average Australian worker is $3,700 “better off” than a year ago, citing this as proof that Labor in government has delivered on its promise to “get wages moving again”. The West Australian newspaper called it “Labor’s wages growth win”. Other media headlines could almost have tricked you into thinking that workers are getting richer right now.
Australia’s teacher shortage is becoming increasingly desperate. Some schools have resorted to offering sign-on bonuses of up to $10,000 to attract staff—money that will have to be offset with cuts in other areas.
Before the March 2023 NSW election, state ALP leader Chris Minns made a series of promises to public sector workers: to hire more nurses, to create more teaching positions and to improve public sector pay and working conditions, including scrapping the public sector wage cap of 2.5 percent for all 400,000 public sector workers.
As the referendum approaches, the key dynamic in the debate is clear. The conservative right views a defeat for the Voice as a chance to strike a devastating blow against support for Indigenous rights among the Australian population. In the process, it is reviving every racist myth in the play book: Indigenous people shouldn’t get “special privileges”; opposing anti-Aboriginal racism is actually “dividing the nation”; and the colonisation of Australia had only a “positive impact”, in the words of Jacinta Price.