Australia’s goods and services tax is the one tax that the rich in this country love.
Workers across the Brisbane stores of a stationery chain walked off the job on Saturday to highlight their demands for minimum award pay and conditions.
The Australian Labor Party’s national conference, representing trade unions, party branches and parliamentarians, has decisively backed the AUKUS nuclear submarine treaty. While AUKUS was the most controversial question internally, the conference was largely silent on the pressing cost-of-living crisis, particularly on housing.
In much of the reporting on Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, a great deal has been made of the involvement of the Wagner Group, a mercenary outfit run by billionaire capitalist Yevgeny Prigozhin. Indeed, the scale of mercenary involvement in Russia’s Ukraine war has been so great that it has “completely erased the boundary between mercenary groups, regular troops, and ‘volunteers’”, according to the Russian opposition website Meduza.
The Australian Greens achieved unprecedented success at the last federal election, gaining their highest ever number of parliamentary seats after putting forward a left-wing platform calling for including dental and mental health in Medicare, the wiping of student debt, 1 million affordable homes, free child care and income-support increases.
The majority of the world’s population live in so-called developing states, in a condition of shameful economic degradation and inequality.