Few people would have shared tears — unless they happened to be chopping onions at the time — when Tony Abbott was ejected as prime minister in the latest of a string of Lib-Lab leadership spills.
Let's be honest. The rolling TV coverage of Malcolm Turnbull's political assassination of Abbott kept the nation entertained for a couple of hours on a Monday night. Who did not enjoy watching the grim faces of those Liberal MPs as they trooped into their party room for the spill, and the even grimmer faces of some as they came back out?
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There are sprawling industries and self-proclaimed career “terrorism experts” in the US that profit greatly by deliberately exaggerating the threat of terrorism and keeping Americans in a state of abject fear of “radical Islam”.
All sorts of polemicists build their public platforms by demonising Muslims and scoffing at concerns over “Islamophobia”. The most toxic ones insist that such a thing does not even exist, even as the mere presence of mosques is opposed across the country and are physically attacked.
The historian Geoffrey Blainey recently addressed staff at BHP headquarters in Melbourne on the 130th anniversary of the forming of Broken Hill Propriety Company Limited in 1885.
Blainey told the assembled audience “there is no commercial institution in Australia that has contributed so much to the nation’s history”.
To set the historical record straight, he should have added that there is no commercial institution that has fought so hard against the workers whose surplus value it expropriated than BHP.
Water buybacks for the Murray Darling basin will be capped at 1500 gigalitres after Labor joined with the Coalition to pass a bill in the Senate on September 14.
The bill was backed by the National Farmers' Federation and means the government will be able to buy back only 1500 gigalitres of water entitlements from farmers each year.
Resistance: Young Socialist Alliance will host its second Radical Ideas Conference over December 4 to 6 in Sydney. Following the success of last year’s conference, hosted in Geelong, Resistance activists say this conference will help energise young people to struggle against corporate power, environmental destruction and social exclusion.
The conference will have workshops and panels including discussions on topics such as combating the austerity agenda of the 1%, fighting back against racism, Islamophobia and colonialism and the struggle for environmental justice.
I come from the same generation as Jeremy Corbyn. We were all born into families who had lived through the war.
My dad joined up as soon as he could and was in the navy for five years. My mum was in a reserved occupation. Her first boyfriend was a rear gunner who was shot down over Berlin in 1943, aged 19.
One of my uncles lost his leg at Niemagen. My primary school had air raid shelters. Most of the dads of my friends had been in the services.
Westpac workers have managed to break the link between targets and annual salary in the recent Enterprise Agreement (EA) negotiations between Westpac and the Finance Sector Union (FSU).
After two months of negotiations, including a petition signed by workers across the Westpac Group, FSU negotiators reached an “in principle” agreement effective from 2016.
The link between targets and annual salary increases has been broken, with staff only required to meet minimum behaviour standards and complete compulsory compliance training — which 98% of staff achieved in the last two years.
Carol Hucker worked on Manus Island as a counsellor for International Health and Medical Services (IHMS) and as a case worker for the Salvation Army from June 2013 to July last year.
She has allowed Green Left Weekly to publish her account so that people can become more aware of what is happening on Manus Island. She said: “It is my hope that through this brief account the men on Manus will not be forgotten.”
This is the fourth part of a multi-part series and covers November 2013 to January 2014.
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The federal government will allow the factory freezer supertrawler the Geelong Star to resume night fishing in the Small Pelagic Fishery, despite no evidence that the vessel will avoid killing more dolphins and seals.
The Geelong Star was banned from night fishing by environment minister Greg Hunt in May in response to community outrage at dolphin and seal deaths caused by the supertrawler.
It will use a new, untested barrier net, but it is not required to use video cameras.
An Afghan refugee who set himself on fire in a Western Australian detention centre has died.
The man, Ali Jafarri who was believed to be in his late 30s, had burns to 90% of his body after the incident at the Yongah Hill detention centre.
According to the ABC, detainees and Serco guards found Jafarri barely alive in his room. He is believed to have wrapped himself in a sheet before dousing himself with accelerant and setting himself on fire. Two guards who helped him were also injured.
In the latest blow to the anti-worker industrial policies of the federal Coalition government, staff in the Department of Human Services (DHS) have voted by 83% to reject an enterprise bargaining agreement offer from management. More than 78% participated in the ballot.
The overwhelming result in DHS follows strong votes in a number of other agencies recently, including Veterans Affairs, IP Australia and Health, to oppose agreements that would have attacked their rights, conditions and take-home pay.
Newly-elected Nationals Party president Larry Anthony has been revealed to be the executive director and co-owner of a lobby firm that counted coal company Shenhua Watermark as a client.
Anthony’s firm, SAS Group, lobbied for Shenhua until July this year. The company wants to build an open-cut coalmine near Gunnedah, on the Liverpool Plains. The mine is expected to produce 10 million tonnes of coal a year.
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