Three young Tamil Australians began a hunger strike on April 11 to demand that the Australian government press for a permanent ceasefire by the Sri Lankan Army. The SLA is carrying out a brutal military offensive against the Tamil people in the
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As the only weekly newspaper in Australia to regularly house news, discussions and debates on capitalisms crises and socialist solutions, Green Left Weekly is proud to be hosting the World At A Crossroads conference, to be held at Sydney Girls High, over the Easter weekend (April 10-12).
On March 30, a Federal Court hearing at Nepabunna gave a consent determination finally confirming the Adnyamathanha peoples native title rights over their traditional lands.
Qantas workers at Sydney Airport struck for four hours on March 30. Workers held a mass delegates meeting to respond to plans to outsource jobs at Sydney, Launceston and Hobart airports. Baggage handlers, ramp, fleet and catering staff at airports in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth also took industrial action.
“I’m a huge supporter of the civil society and the internet is the Wild West at the moment”, federal communications minister Stephen Conroy told SBS’s Insight on March 31. Conroy and the Labor Party remain determined to fence the internet in, joining a short list of countries that attempt to censor it.
More than 3000 workers, organised by the Public Service Association, marched on NSW Parliament House on April 2 to oppose the planned privatisation of the Goulburn and Cessnock jails.
The article below is by Peter Boyle, the national secretary of the Democratic Socialist Perspective, which is a Marxist tendency in the Socialist Alliance. Boyle attended the founding congress of the new mass-based left-wing Power of the Masses Party (PLM) in Manila in February. He also met with military rebels, some supportive of the PLM, currently in prison for trying to overthrow the corrupt, neoliberal government of President Gloria Arroyo. A longer version of this article can be found at the socialist e-journal Links, http://www.links.org.au.
Members of the Aboriginal community were joined by construction and manufacturing unionists at a 350-strong protest on April 3 to bring an end to deaths of Aboriginal people in custody.
As capitalism sinks into a growing crisis of war and economic meltdown, people around the world are waking up to the fact that something is drastically wrong with the system that is throwing millions into poverty, wrecking our climate and turning entire countries into battlefields.
Speaking on March 30 in Qatar, the day before the two-day summit of South American and Arab countries, Venezuela President Hugo Chavez said the meeting represented the “coming together” of two regions that have experienced “centuries of struggle against colonialism”.
Senator Humaira Namati, a member of the upper house of the Afghan parliament, said the new law that has been signed by US-backed President Harzai Karzai was “worse than during the Taliban”, the March 31 British Guardian said.
According to a 2008 report by UN agencies UNAIDS and the World Health Organisation, an estimated 1.9 million people were newly infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa in 2007, bringing the number of people living with HIV in the region to 22 million.
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