Roz Ward is an NTEU member, casual academic and Victorian Socialists candidate for Darebin city council's South Central ward.
Australian universities have been stealing the wages of their most vulnerable workers for years. Almost one in four of Australia’s public universities is currently “repaying money, undertaking audits or in dispute with casual staff”, according to a recent ABC report. Top of the list is one of the richest institutions in the country, Melbourne University, with an executive team that were collectively paid a princely $12,198,000 last year.
The recently published Stuff the Accord! Pay Up! tells the little-known story of workers’ resistance to the Prices and Incomes Accord agreed between the ACTU and the Hawke Labor government in 1983. Red Flag’s Roz Ward and Ryan Stanton spoke to the book’s author, veteran socialist activist Liz Ross, who was a public service union delegate during the Accord years, about the book
A new page dedicated to “Gender Issues” in the Australian is a disgusting platform for bigoted and backward ideas. Each week, the editors push journalists to scrape together new piles of transphobic shit to peddle as news. Their coverage has been widely condemned by LGBTI activists and medical professionals. AusPATH, the body that represents doctors and workers in gender health, put out a statement saying that the Australian’s coverage of transgender topics is “biased, emotive and ... not based on fact”.
Australia’s special military forces will enjoy an additional $3 billion in funding over the next two decades as part of the government’s commitment to spending 2 percent of GDP on “defence” by 2021. The combined military will receive an extra $200 billion in funding over the next 10 years. This is the largest increase in defence funding outside of war since the colonisation of Australia. Labor has gone on record supporting the increase.
The Andrews Labor government will spend an additional $1.8 billion on prisons and corrections in the next year, building a huge new maximum security prison for men and expanding the women’s prison at Ravenhall.