Across the eleven lower house seats contested by the Victorian Socialists in the north and west of Melbourne, more than 22,000 voters gave us their first preference. With counting ongoing, this is easily the largest number of votes for a socialist electoral project in many years in this country.
Scott Morrison has dragged out this term of his inept, reactionary mess of a government until the last possible moment. But next month we finally have the chance to boot him and his band of billionaire-loving, climate-change-denying Neanderthals out of office.
After a rout of Russian forces in the first week of its Ukraine invasion, Vladimir Putin abandoned his initial strategy of overthrowing the Zelensky government with minimum casualties. He ordered the Russian military to revert to what it knows best— imposing its will through the slaughter of thousands of civilians.
Today, for the first time since the USSR developed its own atomic arsenal to challenge US nuclear hegemony, the world faces the realistic possibility of a war between great powers that might not immediately end in the mutual destruction of both sides and the end of all human civilisation. If anything, that makes the war more likely. We have to do whatever we can to stop it from happening.