Nurses and midwives in New South Wales have rejected the state government’s insulting offer of a 3 percent pay rise in a combative, all-membership meeting at Sydney’s Town Hall.
Fifteen years ago, the John Howard federal Coalition government launched a military invasion and occupation of Aboriginal townships and lands in the Northern Territory. More than 600 military and police personnel, accompanied by a phalanx of government bureaucrats, entered 73 Aboriginal communities, placing them under the unilateral control of the Australian army.
Around the US, tens of thousands have hit the streets slamming the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established abortion as a right. In Manhattan, a large crowd of young, multiracial activists marched, chanting “Fuck the Supreme Court!”
“On the day of my mother’s funeral, I went home and wrote reports”, Kate says. She’s a public high school teacher and, along with 50,000 others, many also from Catholic schools, she’s striking to demand better pay and reduced workloads from the New South Wales government.
In the late 1960s, cryptic notes began to appear on poles and noticeboards around Chicago, directing women who were pregnant and in trouble to “call Jane”. The number provided connected them to the Jane Collective (officially the Abortion Counselling Service of Women’s Liberation), an underground network of activists providing illegal abortions in the years before the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision. This collective is the subject of The Janes, a new HBO documentary directed by Emma Pildes and Tia Lessin.
Anthony Albanese started his victory speech on election night with a commitment that his government would implement the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full, beginning with a referendum to create an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in its first term.
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UK Home Secretary Priti Patel has approved the extradition of Julian Assange to the US, where he will face 18 espionage charges brought against him by the Department of Justice. The charges carry a combined penalty of up to 175 years in prison. It is another cut in the long, torturous crucifixion of the Wikileaks founder, who dared to embarrass and expose the war crimes of the US empire and its allies.
When a new government is being formed, the appointment of senior bureaucrats to the public service often tells you as much about how the country will be run, and in whose interests, as does the allocation of ministries to politicians.
Universities around the country are entering enterprise bargaining negotiations and there’s a debate about what the National Tertiary Education Union’s wage claim should be.
COVID has impacted the lives of almost everyone in Australia, through illness, isolation and/or lockdowns. For two years it was at the centre of Australian politics, polarising opinion between supporters and critics of government health measures, exposing divisions between the state and federal governments and leading to a revival of right-wing street protests.
If you want a model of a society that puts profits before people, Australia at the moment wouldn’t be a bad place to start. Matt Grudnoff, senior economist at the Australia Institute, last month described the recent collapse in living standards as “the biggest destruction of real wages in Australia since records began”. The Reserve Bank said that the declines could go on, month after month, until the end of 2023. Yet the newly elected “party of labour” is hardly lifting a finger to address it.
It has been generations in the making but, on 19 June, the first ever leftist president of Colombia was elected. Gustavo Petro defeated his right-wing opponent, Rodolfo Hernández, in a second-round run-off with 50.4 percent of the vote against 47.3 percent. The traditional conservative and centre-left coalitions were both defeated in the first round, winning 24 percent and 4 percent of the vote respectively.
There’s plenty to be said about the outcome of the Fair Work Commission’s annual wage review—but the widespread claims of a “union win” fall flat. After all, for most workers affected by this week’s FWC decision, the result will be a cut to real wages.
Public sector workers in New South Wales went on strike today, demanding a pay rise. Chants of “3 percent won’t pay the rent!” rang out from thousands of Public Service Association (PSA) union members gathered outside the state parliament.
The Liberal Party, since its formation in 1946, has been the political mouthpiece of the Australian ruling class. The federal election destroyed much of its electoral heartland and puts the future of the party as a united entity in doubt. In city after city, seats that the Liberals (and their conservative antecedents) had held for decades fell to their opponents.
Since early April, Sri Lanka has been engulfed by a wave of mass protests demanding the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Thousands of workers and students have mobilised in the most significant mass movement in 30 years.
Thirty-six years after disgraced dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr was driven out of the Philippines by the “People Power” movement, his son Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr has been elected president in a landslide victory.
For decades the right in Australia and around the world have argued that any serious shift away from fossil fuels would, in addition to massive job losses, result in a punishing rise in living costs. This has, perhaps, been their single most effective piece of propaganda—one that positions them as the champions of workers and the poor who will be most impacted by increases in the price of electricity and other essential goods and services.