Hundreds of people joined a rally on Parliament Lawns in Hobart to call for whistleblower Julian Assange to be freed and support public interest journalism, reports Tristan Sykes.
Christine Milne
While there are serious flaws in Inside the Greens, author Paddy Manning is too good a journalist to suppress vital information. Some of it is explosive.
For instance, during the recent conflicts in the Australian Greens between The Greens NSW and Bob Brown devotees, some in the later camp pushed for the wholesale expulsion of the former.
That was not the only example of such blow-up-the-ship thinking.
“Richard Di Natale, I am a member of Left Renewal and I hope you can hear this because the Greens are my party too,” a woman said to great applause at a meeting of Left Renewal (LR) on January 25.
More than 100 people, including from Newcastle and Wollongong, came to the first public meeting of LR, an anti-capitalist grouping within The Greens, to hear about its aims and objectives.
With the escalation of the war on Gaza in the past week, now is the time for the Greens to urgently reconsider backing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign (BDS). This campaign aims to bring international pressure on Israel until it stops human rights abuses against Palestinians.
BDS has grown rapidly in Australia in recent years, though mainstream politics has barely noted its progress.
Even the Greens, generally far more sympathetic to the suffering of the Palestinian people, have now completely abandoned BDS.