What’s left in the ALP?
With a Bill Shorten ALP government likely to take office this year, will any opposition come from Labor’s left to the party’s right wing policies? Don’t count on it. Last year ended with the ALP national conference in Adelaide. With the Liberals in crisis, and with an election-winning lead...CONTINUE READING
The dirty truth about pollution
In 1845, Friedrich Engels wrote, “These east and north-east sides of Manchester are the only ones on which the bourgeoisie has not built, because ten or eleven months of the year the west and south-west wind drives the smoke of all the factories hither, and that the working people alone ma...CONTINUE READING
One of the best protests in years as hundreds blockade Liberal fundraiser
In (actual) Armani suits and pearls they came. Struggling with the unfamiliar surrounds of Redfern, and many making the mistake of having their chauffeurs drop them off before they knew what awaited them; they looked shocked and a little lost. Cashed-up Liberals, doing their bit to boost t...CONTINUE READING
Greens leaders move to purge the left
The Australian Greens have lobbed a grenade into their New South Wales branch in a dramatic escalation of the more right wing leadership’s long-running campaign to purge the left wing of the party. The Australian Greens party room, comprising the 10 federal parliamentarians, announced in a...CONTINUE READING
The fightback begins in France
Tens of thousands of Parisians took to the streets on 8 May, the first day of Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. The protest was an impressive opening salvo from the left in what is sure to be a bitter struggle against Macron’s neoliberal agenda. Macron, who tried to present himself during the...CONTINUE READING
The fight to save Saeed
A desperate fight is being undertaken by refugee activists around Australia to stop the government deporting a man to extreme danger. Saeed is a 60-year-old stateless refugee from a persecuted minority in Iraq, who faces imminent danger if he is returned there. The head of his village was...CONTINUE READING
Dehumanising Human Services – literally
“Our vision is that in the future when you first interact with DHS [Department of Human Services], it’s with a virtual assistant: you outline your circumstance – I’ve just lost my job, my mother has died, I’ve just been kicked out of home – so the virtual assistant will need to be able to...CONTINUE READING
‘We’ve created a revolution in the Northern Beaches’ – Victory at Harrison
After 17 days on strike, workers at Harrison Manufacturing, in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, are celebrating a hard-fought victory. As previously reported in Red Flag , the key issue of the strike was union representation. An increasingly nasty and bullying management was refusing to allow wo...CONTINUE READING
The legacy of Obama
So began Barack Obama’s victory speech in Chicago on 4 November 2008. Eight years later, as the world watches the debacle of Trump vs. Clinton, the two most unpopular candidates in US history, it is fair to say that doubts about the greatness of US democracy are more widespread than ever....CONTINUE READING