Across the country, tens of thousands took to the streets to protest on Invasion Day. Five thousand in Adelaide, 10,000 in Brisbane, 15,000 in Sydney and an unprecedented 20,000 protesters in Melbourne turned out to mark 26 January as the bloody anniversary of colonial invasion, expropriation and genocide.
The scale of the climate crisis has driven a new generation of radical young activists to demand “system change, not climate change”. This is a welcome leftward shift within environmental politics—away from a focus on individual consumption and towards confronting the capitalist system. However, many of those making this demand lack both a coherent analysis of how a system like capitalism might be changed and a strategic orientation toward those who have the power to change it.
“Net zero by 2050” (or 2060 in China’s case) has become the new mainstream political mantra on climate change. However, this ambitious-sounding, yet still far from adequate, goal is premised on a series of new technologies that remain untested at best and completely hypothetical at worst.
Federal government welfare cuts will push an extra 330,000 Australians into poverty in the new year, bringing the total number of people impoverished since September to 1.16 million, according to one of Australia’s top economic policy analysts.
Before mobile phones and social media became ubiquitous, it was virtually impossible for ordinary citizens to document police brutality, let alone share it with the rest of the world. Yet, more than 50 years ago, a small group of young Black activists from the San Francisco Bay Area in the US state of California succeeded in doing just that.
In March, COVID-19 breached the considerable defences of the USS Theodore Roosevelt. The colossal nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, which has played a central role in defending the US’s imperialist interests over the past three decades, proved no match for the virus, which infected more than 1,000 crew members in a matter of days.