Socialist Equality Party

Mike Head, 57, an SEP national committee member, WSWS correspondent and University of Western Sydney law lecturer, will contest the outer south-western seat of Fowler. The area includes major working class suburbs and newer outlying areas where young families are struggling with rising home repayments and record levels of personal debt. Head will challenge former union official Chris Hayes, whom Labor’s factional bosses shunted into the electorate from neighbouring Werriwa to make way for another MP, Laurie Ferguson, whose seat was abolished in an electoral redistribution.

Police conduct “terrorist” raids on eve of Australian election

By Mike Head
20 August 2010

Just two days before the Australian general election, federal and state police yesterday conducted dawn raids in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth on 17 homes and offices of Kurdish Australians in what the police described as a “joint counter terrorism investigation”.

Labor pledges new assault on the jobless and welfare recipients

By Mike Head,
12 August 2010

In a document entitled “Modernising Australia’s Welfare System,” the Labor government yesterday announced far-reaching measures designed to punish the unemployed and dismantle welfare entitlements.

Labor’s welfare plan, released 10 days before the August 21 federal election, makes clear that one of the central agenda items of a re-elected Gillard government will be to force jobless workers off benefits and into low-paid work, and to give employers a green light to slash pay and conditions.

SEP candidate for Fowler speaks on the assault on democratic rights

The following is the edited text of a speech delivered by Mike Head to a public meeting held on 8 August in Green Valley in Sydney’s southwestern working class suburbs. Head focussed his remarks on the deepening erosion of fundamental legal and democratic rights.

The reports to the meeting delivered by Head and the SEP’s national organiser and candidate for Grayndler, James Cogan, provoked considerable discussion, with members of the audience asking questions about the mass media’s refusal to give any coverage to the SEP, the reasons behind Australia’s participation in the war in Afghanistan, the nuclear technology deal being finalised between the US and Vietnam, and the prospects of winning the support of the American working class for revolutionary socialism.

Deep disquiet in western Sydney over Labor’s leadership coup

By an SEP reporting team
5 August 2010 

One of the most striking features of the Socialist Equality Party’s campaign in the outer south-western Sydney electorate of Fowler for the August 21 federal election has been the hostility that broad layers of people have expressed toward the June 23-24 backroom coup that installed Prime Minister Julia Gillard at the expense of Kevin Rudd.

Labor’s leadership coup starts to unravel amid leaks and counter-leaks

By Mike Head
2 August 2010 

With less than three weeks to go before the August 21 federal election, Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s government has been shaken by a series of serious leaks from within the senior ranks of the Labor Party. Media opinion polls now suggest that the Labor government is back exactly where it was before Gillard ousted Kevin Rudd—facing defeat in its first term of office, the first such debacle since the 1930s.

A revealing political line-up in election campaign

By Oliver Campbell
20 July 2010 

A National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) forum in Sydney last Thursday provided a foretaste of the joint efforts that will be made by the Labor Party, unions, Greens and pseudo “left” groups to suppress all discussion of the two most critical issues in the August 21 federal election and to channel unprecedented popular disaffection with the official political establishment back into the safe channels of the Labor Party.

Prime Minister Gillard calls snap election

By Mike Head
19 July 2010

Newly-installed Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard last Saturday called a federal election for August 21, giving the shortest time legally possible for the campaign.

A key factor in the snap poll was the decision by Gillard and Labor Party bosses to attempt to shut down all public discussion of the June 24 coup that removed Kevin Rudd as prime minister and the agenda behind it.