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On August 4, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released figures that showed housing prices across Australia’s capital cities rose by 4.2% over the three months ending in June. The rapid increase has worried the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) enough for it to warn of a threat of a housing bubble.
The largest demonstrations for same-sex marriage in Australia’s history took place on August 1. A 3000-strong rally marched on the national ALP conference in Sydney. Four thousand took to the streets in Melbourne. Record crowds mobilised in other cities.
Message Stick: Something to Celebrate – A celebration of the Indigenous news and culture program's 10th birthday, including highlights from the last decade and a birthday party featuring well-known performers filmed in front of a live studio
On July 28, Castlemaine members of the Support Association for the Women of Afghanistan (SAWA) organised a birthing kit assembly day at the local hospital.
The Australian and US government’s have proposed carbon trading schemes as a response to the threat of climate change. How to respond has been hotly debated in the climate action movements of both countries. Green Left Weekly has campaigned strongly for the Rudd government’s carbon trading scheme to be rejected as a false response to the climate emergency. Below, Ilan Salbe puts an alternative view.
Aboriginal elders and families from Ampilatwatja have set up a permanent protest camp outside their government-controlled community in protest against policies that have neglected their needs and desires.
In the state that claims to have the greenest energy on the Australian mainland, South Australia’s climate camp will confront two of the country’s dirtiest power stations. The Northern and Playford B plants, fuelled by cheap but low-grade brown coal, are just outside Port Augusta, a four-hour drive north of Adelaide.
BRISBANE — Seven hundred teachers staged an after-school rally outside state parliament on August 5. The rally was organised after the Industrial Relations Commission ruled against a planned statewide strike.
On August 4, more than 400 police, including the Australian Federal Police and ASIO, staged a pre-dawn raid on 19 homes across Melbourne. The raid was carried out under the federal government’s “anti-terrorism laws” — extreme and repressive legislation created by the previous Howard government.
NSW TAFE teachers in NSW will stop work on August 11 after the NSW Department of Education and Training (DET) proposed an increase of 71 teaching hours a week, an end to the allocation of professional development and a lifting of the ceiling on hours taught in any one week.
The article below is by Don Franks, an organiser with the Unite union. Unite is seeking to organise a citizens’ initiated referendum, a non-binding vote allowed for by New Zealand law, to raise workers’ wages.
The head of Venezuela's telecommunications agency (CONATEL), Diosdado Cabello, announced the immediate closure of 32 privately owned radio stations and two regional television stations on August 1.