Australia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been shaped by the basic realities of contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism, argues Dave Holmes.
Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL)
As the debate over the efficacy and availability of various privately marketed anti-COVID vaccines intensifies here and internationally, the time to re-establish our own critical public medical institution is right now, argues Jim McIlroy.
More than 400 workers from several unions, notably the CFMEU, took their fight straight to billion dollar miner Rio Tinto for its complicity in sacking Australian seafarers and replacing them with foreign workers, who are paid as little as $2 an hour.
On February 5 in the Port of Newcastle, five crew members were marched down the gangway of the CSL Melbourne by more than 30 police. Those same police escorted the foreign replacement crew onto the ship to sail it away.