In an attempt to seize a share of a market dominated by China, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has placed Australia’s rare earths and critical minerals at the disposal of United States strategic and war interests. Binoy Kampmark reports.
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Boat turn-backs. Offshore Detention. Refusal to settle groups of refugees in Australia. This triad is the 10-year-long contemporary White Australia policy of governments, Labor and Coalition. Jonathan Strauss argues for the need to step up the pressure.
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Thousands of refugee rights activists, in more than 20 protests around the country, filled streets chanting “Six years too long, bring them here” on July 20.
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A group of activists from Grandmothers Against Removals (GMAR) and the Socialist Alliance gathered in front of NSW Parliament on February 9 to protest on the 10th anniversary of the national apology from former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
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Born in 1872 to a wealthy land-owning family, Alexandra Kollontai was raised in both Russia and Finland, acquiring an early fluency in languages which served her well in her later revolutionary work. She began her political work in 1894, when she was a new mother, by teaching evening classes for workers in St Petersburg.
Through that activity she was drawn into public and clandestine work with the Political Red Cross, an organisation set up to help political prisoners. In 1895, she read August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, which had a major influence on her ideas about the emancipation of women.
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Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has bowed to objections by the Coalition’s right wing and declined to support former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd for the role of Secretary-General of the United Nations. Turnbull said he made a “considered judgement” to not back Rudd because he was not suited to the role. Turnbull’s nomination is a necessary prerequisite for the bid, so his verdict essentially ends Rudd’s campaign. -
Recently Facebook reminded me of a “memory” of an article I posted three years ago. I had said that I was doing the happy dance because we were making progress and were finally being heard. -
Hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander grandmothers from across the country converged on Parliament House in Canberra on February 11, to demand an end to the high child removal rate of Aboriginal children. Most of the elders participating in the protest were members of the Stolen Generation themselves, snatched from their families as children as part of official government policy. Today, they say, the removals continue unabated, continuing to tear families apart, denying Aboriginal children their culture and creating a new generation of lost children. -
Tony Abbott received a much-deserved roasting on the opening night of the Sydney Fringe Comedy festival on September 1. Unfortunately no actual fire was involved, but the prime minister — played disturbingly well by Jonas Holt (whose Abbott impersonation has featured on Weekend Sunrise and the At Home With Tones webseries) — was subjected to an amusing grilling. -
After the ALP caucus deposed Julia Gillard in June this year, her recycled replacement, Kevin Rudd, thanked them by making sure that they wouldn’t get the chance to sack him a second time. In what many of them saw as an ambush, he proposed to a surprised caucus that, in future, Labor leaders should be elected by ballot of both the caucus and the party’s rank-and-file members. It would not be open to caucus to depose any leader again unless 75% of them decided that he or she had “brought the party into disrepute.”
