The battle remains for working and unemployed people to push for a response that puts public health first, without making them pay for the crisis.
The COVID-19 crisis has revealed (once again) how the profits-first capitalist system fails to look after the needs of ordinary people. Here are five lessons of the crisis.
It is clear that the Australian government has badly mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic with doctors now warning that Australia is on track to be in a "worse position than Italy is currently in".
If there is one thing the recent unprecedented bushfire emergency has proved to us in Australia — and to millions in countries who watched on in horror — is that the climate emergency is not just something to worry about in the future: this is the climate emergency and it is already catastrophic.
The Socialist Alliance has recently updated our Climate Emergency Action Plan (or Climate Charter) that was first developed in 2010.
The 2010 document was groundbreaking. Long before other parties, Socialist Alliance adopted the policy of 100% renewable energy in a ten year period. We took this position as soon as its viability was demonstrated. We were treating the climate crisis as an issue that needed a society-wide emergency response.
The science is clear: to stop runaway warming we will need to create net zero emissions economies and societies well before 2050. At a minimum we need 100% renewable energy by 2030.
Arndt and Hanson are femicide deniers. Like climate change deniers who refuse to acknowledge the science, these two deny that the intentional killing of women is a growing problem that governments need to address.
Disgruntled homophobes in the Coalition were determined to bring in protections for religious institutions that want the right to discriminate: Morrison is the guy to deliver.
Big corporations fund Australia’s two “parties of government”. They received more than $430 million from corporate Australia in the year leading up to the May 2019 federal election. This is a record amount: $150 million more than the previous highest total.
The context in which Plibersek is attempting her insulting dressing-up of Australian patriotism is the ugly, nakedly racist push by right-wing politicians to whip up nationalism and jingoism at a time when Australia (and the rest of the world) is divided by greater inequality, spawned by a sharper exploitation by the corporate rich.