The road that ate Sydney
Picture a giant pig wearing a top hat hovering over Sydney with its snout in a Macquarie Street trough, and the other end dumping a $40 billion, 33-kilometre pile of concrete on the western suburbs. That describes WestConnex, Australia’s largest infrastructure project, smashing its way thr...CONTINUE READING
Royal commission lets banks off the hook
Tens of millions of dollars outlaid on the Commission’s hearings. Ten thousand submissions from aggrieved customers. A mountain of corporate crime unearthed. But the main outcome of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Financial Services Industry has been to let the big four banks o...CONTINUE READING
‘Enough is enough’: resisting the criminalisation of poverty
Debbie Kilroy doesn’t mince words. “Poverty in Western Australia is a crime – and the state government is ensuring that Aboriginal women are being criminalised because they’re poor.” Kilroy is head of prisoner advocacy group Sisters Inside, which last month launched a GoFundMe campaign to...CONTINUE READING
Australia: What’s to celebrate?
26 January. A Day of tacky US-style patriotism and of supermarket specials on “Aussie” foods like mouldy yeast and putrid sausages. A day in which gangs of marauding drunk white men roam the streets wearing flags as capes. It’s sickening. It doesn’t help that the Australian flag itself is...CONTINUE READING
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
Global political turmoil and its echo in Australia
The turmoil in the Liberal Party highlighted by the downfall of Malcolm Turnbull has been the most important development in Australian politics over the last year. It reflects that politics here is catching up with international developments (the rise of Trump, the surge in support for the...CONTINUE READING
A socialist electoral campaign like none in living memory
For the last two months, hundreds of socialist activists have been pounding the pavements of Melbourne’s northern suburbs – knocking on doors, handing out leaflets at train stations and shopping centres, putting up posters and letterboxing homes. There hasn’t been a socialist electoral cam...CONTINUE READING
Student strike offers a way forward for climate action
Thousands of students walked out of school to demand action on climate change on 30 November, defying prime minister Scott Morrison’s argument that schools not be “turned into parliaments” and for there to be “less activism in schools”. Protests took place in all mainland state capitals an...CONTINUE READING
‘It’s a victory of hope over cynicism’
I’m not usually stuck for words. But to be sitting on 7.4 percent is pretty incredible. We started with a candidate who had never lived in the area, who couldn’t find his way over Pascoe Vale Road – or rather, I could find my way too easily over Pascoe Vale Road: “Oh there it is again, wha...CONTINUE READING