Our Common Cause

Our Common Cause is the column of Socialist Alliance in Green Left which is widely recognised as one of the most authoritative left-wing English-language sources of news and political analysis in print and online. Green Left covers many of the issues and campaigns that Socialist Alliance members are involved in.

Members and supporters are encouraged to promote Green Left while campaigning in their communities and workplaces and to become financial supporters of Green Left to ensure its ongoing production and distribution.

Just as a chain of legitimisation helped revive Pauline Hanson, a mass campaign of delegitimisation is needed to turn back the tide.

It is time to turn back the privatisation tide, reject the sale of Ausgrid unconditionally and prepare to take it back into public ownership.

The shocking abuse suffered by children in Darwin’s Don Dale detention centre revealed by the ABC’s 4 Corners on July 25 has angered wide layers and prompted the nation-wide demand to take immediate action against the perpetrators and ensure that nothing like this can ever happen again in the juvenile detention system.

Malcolm Turnbull's very slim majority is no mandate to re-introduce the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) and other anti-worker legislation that he could not get through the previous Senate.

We need a political project that embodies the possibility an adequate response to runaway global warming, a serious redistribution of wealth and a dignified life for all. It will need to draw on the best of the socialist tradition, left wing Greens, militant unionism, community campaigns - and most of all our collective experience of struggle.

Regardless of which major party, or coalition of parties, forms government after the July 2 election one thing we can be certain of is that the struggle for a people's movement will still be as necessary as ever, writes Ken Canning.

We need a radically different future: one that provides for human development, meets community need, protects our environment and guarantees a safe climate. 

Instead of slugging ordinary working families for hundreds of millions of dollars we should tax the super-rich, says Kamala Emanuel (WA Senate Candidate).

Sue Bolton, a Socialist Alliance councillor in Moreland, has come under heavy pressure for refusing to be cowed by the Victorian Police, sections of her own council and the racist right-wing. 

"A strike for the freedom of any oppressed peoples is a strike for freedom for all people. The road to equity and justice for my people requires smashing the stranglehold the Liberal National coalition and Labor have on political decision making in Australia."

Rational argument by the world's most informed scientists have not been enough to convince the decision-makers of the coal, oil and gas giants to voluntarily stop holding a blow-torch to the planet; nor to persuade the political leaders of the Coalition, Labor or Greens to go beyond what is palatable.

Duncan Storrar — who courageously stood up to the powers-that-be, including the Murdoch media monster — and all those on low and medium wages and incomes, deserves a fair go from the tax system, as well as from the wage, welfare, health and housing system.