Politics & Economy...

Labor’s budget reveals unprecedented revenue collapse

Confronted by a $200 billion collapse in tax revenues over the next four years—the largest fall since the Great Depression—in Tuesday night’s budget, the Rudd Labor government has responded by cutting social spending. [More]

Australian PM’s essay: an exercise in ideological damage control

Australian Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has written a much-publicised essay, entitled "The Global Financial Crisis". [1] The essay's significance, however, resides not in any economic insights, but in what it reveals about the scale of the political crisis confronting the ruling elites and their political parties. [More]

Australia: Haneef “terrorism” inquiry produces a whitewash

The Rudd government's Clarke review of last year's aborted terrorist witch-hunt of Dr Mohamed Haneef has proven to be a whitewash of the former Howard government and a vehicle for the current Labor government to bolster the country's draconian counter-terrorism measures. [More]

Australian university review proposes student vouchers

When the final report of the Rudd government's Bradley Review of Higher Education in Australia was released last month, the media headlines led people to believe that the report was proposing a multi-billion dollar injection of funds into the ailing university system. Although the recommendations speak of increased funding, however, this is conditional on further subjugating education to the same market forces that have created the current global economic disaster. [More]

Workers' Rights & Conditions...

Climate change, the Garnaut report, and the profit system

The Labor government’s Garnaut Climate Change Review has effectively concluded that within the existing international political and social framework, dangerous and potentially irreversible global warming is inevitable. [More]

Climate change, Kyoto, and carbon trading

Part 1: The Howard government and the Kyoto Protocol

While many people have a general understanding of what climate change is, there has been a deliberate suppression, by the political and media establishment, of the agendas underlying the various solutions being advanced by the major parties. Very few people even know what the most commonly used terms—Kyoto, carbon trading, carbon offsetting etc.—actually mean, let alone how these mechanisms work in practice. [More]

Part 2: The orientation of Labor and the Greens

The Labor Party has cynically attempted to appeal to the concern felt by millions of ordinary people over climate change, and their hostility towards the Howard government’s stonewalling. But its real audience is big business. [More]

Conditions of Aboriginal people in Alice Springs and the town camps

For most Australian residents, the Northern Territory (NT) town of Alice Springs—population 26,000 and located in the centre of the continent—is little more than a series of striking picture postcards of spectacular rocky desert scenery, native animals and brilliantly coloured contemporary Aboriginal paintings.

Few have any conception of the harsh conditions endured daily by the central Australian city’s Aboriginal population, or the real social and political impact of the federal government’s 10-month old NT intervention, now being expanded under Rudd Labor. [More]

The SEP 2007 Election Campaign...

The SEP and preferences in the 2007 election