The Albanese government’s National Reconstruction Fund is a $15 billion handout to “Aussie made” big business. Labor calls it the first step in its “plan to rebuild Australia’s industrial base”. The off-budget fund will invest in seven sectors of the economy: resources, agriculture, transport, medical science, renewables, advanced technology manufacturing and defence.
“You don’t know what you’ve started!” was one of many warnings shouted at politicians by leaders of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) earlier this month from the public gallery of the Ontario parliament. The MPs had just passed the strike-breaking Bill 28, or Keeping Students in Class Act, which used something called the “notwithstanding clause” to force a contract onto workers while making it illegal for them to take any strike action.
“Attention, MOVE. This is America. You have to abide by the laws of the United States.” This was the ultimatum given through a Philadelphia police megaphone to a group of Black activists trapped in their home in the early morning of 13 May 1985. The house on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia was surrounded by hundreds of police. Thirteen MOVE members, including five children, were inside.
The Russian military has massed more than 125,000 troops along the Ukrainian border, together with the heavy artillery necessary for an invasion of the country. Why have simmering tensions reached a boiling point yet again? In part, the answer relates to Ukraine’s unique position in European affairs.
Protesters in downtown Toronto in early June toppled a statue of Egerton Ryerson, one of the colonists who helped devise the Canadian “residential school” system. The protest and defacing of the statue came after the discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
JobKeeper relief payments went to businesses to subsidise workers’ wages during the pandemic. They were, Prime Minister Scott Morrison initially claimed, “a lifeline to not only get through this crisis, but bounce back together on the other side”. But the Liberal government handed billions to the bosses with no real strings attached, which made the scheme ripe for rorting.