Western Australian public sector workers will rally at the state parliament on 17 August to demand that wages keep up with the cost of living. The rally, organised by the Public Sector Alliance of nine trade unions, follows several stop-work rallies held at WA hospitals over the last month, involving thousands of health workers.
It seems resistance to foreign invasion and occupation, along with sanctions and other measures targeting countries guilty of mounting such invasions, are good after all. Only the target must be an enemy of the West like Russia, and not a Western client and ally like Israel.
Amnesty International is the latest human rights organisation to declare Israel guilty of the crime of apartheid. The human rights group joins Human Rights Watch, Yesh Din and B’Tselem in reaching the same conclusion over the last two years.
More than 10 million people are incarcerated in prisons around the world. In Australia, the incarceration rate is the highest it has been in a century. According to a recent Productivity Commission research paper, the number of prisoners per 100,000 adults has more than doubled since the mid-1980s and increased by 40 per cent since the beginning of the century.
After a three-week trial, a Western Australian police officer last month was acquitted of the murder and manslaughter of 29-year-old Yamatji Wajarri woman JC.* It took the jury, with no First Nations peers, just three hours to reach its verdict.
The night of 17 June was bitterly cold. A 38-year-old Noongar mother of six, Alana Garlett, laid out her swag in front of Wesley Church, in Perth’s CBD, as she had done every night for years. When ambulance officers came to her aid early the next morning, Alana was having trouble breathing. She was rushed to Royal Perth Hospital, where she died soon after.