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.

It’s obvious that the corporate-profits-first logic is incapable of dealing with the challenge of COVID-19 efficiently or fairly.

Even though different state governments are taking slightly different approaches, the reason for this debate is that governments — state and federal — are making corporate interests a higher priority than people’s health.

The aggressive police operation to “combat” the COVID-19 outbreak in Sydney’s South West is yet another example of politicians’ racist, anti-working class and punitive handling of the pandemic.

The pursuit of Wikileaks founder Assange is founded on a gross manipulation of the legal process – at every step of the way.

Unions are rightly worried that guest workers from South-East Asia will be super-exploited by rural bosses who are used to paying sub-standard wages. The new visa is intended to allow shamefully low wages to continue.

Keeping people out of Australia under the guise of stopping “people smuggling” and “deaths at sea” is no excuse for government cruelty towards people escaping war, torture, persecution and death.

Eight teenagers who took a class action lawsuit against a major extension to the Vickery coal mine, near Gunnedah in New South Wales, won a landmark victory on May 27.

As Australia’s billionaires increased their wealth by 34% since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, while the wages share of national income dropped to a historic low, a billionaire tax is a modest proposal!

The insistence on Israel’s “right to exist” is really a demand for the maintenance of a supremacist “Jewish’’ state, in which Palestinians are second-class citizens.

The federal government delivered another budget for the billionaire class that runs Australia and is hell-bent on putting their profits ahead of the climate emergency.

The squeeze on workers far predates the COVID-19 pandemic. In today’s dollars more than $4 trillion has shifted from workers’ pockets to corporate profits.

The withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan is a welcome development. But it doesn’t mean that the warmongers in Canberra and Washington have been defeated.