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.

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.

Attorney general Christian Porter and Prime Minister Scott Morrison have tried their hardest to confuse, rather than address, the issues surrounding the credible allegations of rape against Porter.

Some of the policies we are proposing that no other party is actively campaigning on include: land rights; net zero emissions within 10 years, bringing strategic monopolised sectors of the economy into democratic public ownership, restricting residential rent increases to the consumer price index, 30,000 new public housing dwellings in four years and; sustainable transport solutions as a better alternative to both Roe 8 and building an Outer Harbour.

Facebook’s “Zucker” punch on February 18, disabling large sections of Facebook in protest at the federal government’s News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC), which led to amendm

The Socialist Alliance strongly condemns the February 1 military coup in Myanmar/Burma and the detention of Aung San Suu Kyi and other leaders of the National League for Democracy (NLD) which won 83% of the vote in the general election last November and calls on the Australian government to deny any recognition to the coup regime.

The federal government’s commitment to a gas-led recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, supported by the Labor opposition, means that Australia is on track to reach net zero emissions in 300 years.

If the country wants to move forward, we need a Sovereign Treaty agreement and land rights.