These people have committed no crime. There is no excuse for locking up innocent people for one day, let alone seven years. Even worse, is to lock them up with no end date in sight.
The Socialist Alliance of Australia condemns the Turkish state’s escalation of illegal cross border air strikes against Kurdish and Yezidi communities in northern Iraq and north-east Syria (Rojava).
Most of the mainstream media ran with that unsubtle lead and went berserk with another round of Trump-style China-bashing, even though the Chinese government had promptly denied the accusation.
The latest evidence of the internal abuses add to a long history of branch stacking in the Labor Party — by all factions.
“When you capture people, and put chains around their necks, and make them walk 300 kilometres and then set them to work on cattle stations, what’s that called?” asked the award-winning author Bruce Pascoe after Prime Minister Scott Morrison stated that there had been no slavery in Australia.
Protests have exploded across the world in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, which itself has exploded since the racist murder of George Floyd on May 25. Every country has its own experience of racism and police brutality.
Socialist councillor Sue Bolton, first elected to Moreland City Council in 2012 and re-elected in 2016, is standing again. Moreland is a hub of community activism going back to the anti-conscription movement during World War I.
The JobMaker plan, announced by Prime Minister Scott Morrison on May 26 at the National Press Club, is an attempt to get us to accept a post-COVID-19 return to the neoliberal regime that made jobs precarious, ran down hospitals and other public services, and made housing and education unaffordable.
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton is using the COVID-19 pandemic to push through amendments to security laws that would further erode people’s rights and which are not proportionate to any particular threat.
While Victorian Socialists showed great potential when it was formed in early 2018 and ran two big and exciting socialist election campaigns, it has not lived up to its promise to build a more united left.