Political liberals sook about Trump not being aggressive enough
You might think it’s good that World War Three didn’t break out this week after the Singapore summit between US president Donald Trump and North Korean chairman Kim Jong-un. Not so, according to a swathe of liberal opinion-makers disappointed that Trump didn’t give Kim a bloody nose. From...CONTINUE READING
A rogue state threatens the world with nuclear war. It’s not North Korea
Is there any limit to the hypocrisy of the US over the pending North Korea summit in Singapore? If you listened to the White House and Pentagon, you’d get the impression that North Korea is the major threat to world peace. So far as Trump and his cronies are concerned, the main goal of the...CONTINUE READING
The problem with the Fair Work Act
The Fair Work Act that is the target of the ACTU’s Change the Rules campaign undermines wages and conditions and hamstrings trade unions. Passed by the Rudd Labor government in 2009, it is a particularly ugly piece of legislation, with many obvious problems. The Howard government’s WorkCho...CONTINUE READING
Morrison’s budget rewards the affluent, punishes the poor
Scott Morrison’s latest Budget is nothing but a bunch of giveaways for the Coalition’s voting base of older, well-heeled, middle class Australians, and miserly scraps for the working class and poor. Far from being a budget for “low and middle income earners”, as the treasurer claims, the b...CONTINUE READING
The system is broken, but we can’t rely on the ALP to change the rules
The system is broken. Soaring bonuses at the top, rampant wage theft below. Corporate rorts left unchecked in the executive suites, the full weight of the police, courts and governments thrown at unions taking action. The fat cats rolling in money, the mass of workers left to rot. Far from...CONTINUE READING
Why we should nationalise the banks
The corporate slogan of the National Australia Bank is “More than money”. Could anything be further from the truth? For the banks, it’s only ever about money – money for senior executives, money for boards of directors and buckets more money for shareholders. The vast pools of money in the...CONTINUE READING
Are unions doomed to fail?
It is often argued that the decline in employment in blue collar work, the closure of big factories, the impact of new technologies and privatisation and the growth of “non-standard” work (casualisation, outsourcing etc.) and job insecurity are responsible for falling unionisation rates be...CONTINUE READING
Marxism 2018 draws a record attendance
The Marxism 2018 conference in Melbourne, organised by Socialist Alternative, drew a record attendance of almost 1,200 over the Easter weekend. Many of the more than 100 scheduled sessions were full houses. The conference attracted people from across Australia and New Zealand. Speakers fle...CONTINUE READING
Marxism conference kicks off in Melbourne
The 2018 Marxism conference kicked off in Melbourne tonight. More than four hundred people packed into the Collingwood Town Hall to hear a panel of activists and socialists talk about “Fifty years since 1968: Rebuilding global resistance to capitalism”. Gavin Stanbrook, Indigenous activist...CONTINUE READING