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!
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.
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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.
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