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.
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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.
The property-owning class has come out of the pandemic richer and more determined to use their wealth to get even wealthier. Typically, they are demanding measures that will only make housing prices more unaffordable to most.
The Labor party’s stage-managed policy conference was a clear demonstration that leader Anthony Albanese plans to continue the party’s “small target” strategy, offering working people very little in a pandemic recession and climate emergency.
The end of the JobKeeper program on March 28 means that up to 500,000 jobs are at risk, according to Small Business Australia (SBA).
The truth is that Labor, like the Coalition, can be pressured by popular campaigns to adopt progressive policies; and we’d all be better off if Labor was forced to adopt better refugee policies.