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Performance pay: individual contracts for teachers

On February 21, the federal education minister Julie Bishop announced a proposal to introduce “performance-based pay” for teachers in public schools.

On the box

Australia by Numbers: Sydney 2000 —Traces the birth and life of the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs. Features interviews with Chicka Dixon, Gary Foley, Joyce Clague, Esther Carroll and Ray Carroll, combined with previously unseen archival

The power of progressive purchase

Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping
by Judith Levine
Free Press, 2006
274 pages, $39.95 (hb)

US Iraq commander wants thousands more troops

On February 17 — one day after the US House of Representatives approved a non-binding, bipartisan resolution opposing President George Bush’s plan to increase the size of the US occupation force in Iraq by 21,500 combat troops — the commander of US forces in Baghdad announced he had filed a request for even more soldiers.

George W. Bush, 1946-2007

Death of a President
Written, produced & directed by Gabriel Range
Hopscotch Films
In cinemas from March 1

Death stalks a woman's spiritual journey

The Gates of Egypt
Written by Stephen Sewell
Directed by Kate Gaul
Company B, Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney
Until March 11

From the miner

I went down to the mine to black diamond country
So the face of the earth would be warm comrade
For years I silently waved a pick in this prison
So that my children would smile comrade
But there is no one smiling in our home

Working the airwaves

Sydney has long endured right-wing shock jocks taking cash for comment from corporate sponsors, but a new radio program is providing a refreshing change with a focus on working families, strong communities and industrial rights.

ElBaradei warns against Iran enrichment 'hype'

In an interview printed in the February 19 London Financial Times, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said that Iran could be as little as six months away from being able to enrich uranium to fuel-grade level on an industrial scale.

West Papua - calling it a betrayal would be too generous

February 23 marked the deadline for submissions to the federal parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (JSCT) on the new Australia-Indonesia “security” pact. If there is any uncertainty about the hypocrisy that underlies Australia’s neo-colonial foreign policy, then this treaty — a “mending the fences” exercise after the federal government granted asylum to 43 pro-independence West Papuan refugees in 2006, and, before that, Canberra’s reluctant 1999 intervention in East Timor — should end it.

Philippines: Death squads escalate their dirty work

Many Australians would assume that death squads, disappearances, harassment by the military, violent dispersal of demonstrations and political prisoners were features of the Philippines that vanished when Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship was overthrown in 1986.