Environment

For serious climate action to be a reality we need a society where the majority of people — workers, farmers, students, the poor, First Nations people and refugees, the victims of climate change — are making decisions in the interests of our collective future.  

Socialist Alliance candidates involved in the growing protest movement against the bulldozing of the Beeliar Wetlands have reacted sharply to claims published by the City of Melville, and reported in The West Australian on 27 January, regarding the construction of the Perth Freight Link.

The deepening crisis of capitalism and the political polarisation that results makes the task of raising socialist solutions all the more urgent. Socialist Alliance continues our non-sectarian approach to building the movements and campaigns of resistance.

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.

The powers-that-be in NSW have deemed that there are so many examples of “unsafe protest activities” across the state that, to make everyone safe, we need new laws that will protect “lawful business activity”.

More than 2000 People's Climate Marches were held over the weekend of November 27 to 29. In Australia more than 140,000 people took to the streets to show they care, passionately, about climate change. They are also angry at government inaction, as illustrated by the many homemade placards and props.

In the face of the ongoing ecological crisis unleashed by the drive for corporate profits, Resistance: Young Socialist Alliance (RYSA) would like to express our support for the campaign calling on universities and other public institutions to divest from fossil fuels and express our solidarity with students who are locked in the struggle to force universities to divest.
The University of Queensland Resistance Club has joined with other student clubs to call on the university administration to divest money from fossil fuels.
Socialist Alliance welcomes the news (March 6) that the Baird government has cancelled the coal seam gas (CSG) license covering metropolitan Sydney (PEL 463).
“Greece is turning the page,” SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras told an ecstatic crowd on January 25. The radical left party had just come first in historic elections in Greece with 36.3% of the vote.

Joseph Elu, chair of the Torres Strait Regional Authority, told Radio National’s PM on January 5 that the islands that have been home to Indigenous people for thousands of years are “being inundated”, right now because of climate change.

As parliament wound up for the year, the Coalition government was desperate to salvage a symbolic “win” in the Senate to save some face. It was reeling from the defeat of the one-term Liberal government in Victoria, which was seen as a vote against Prime Minister Tony Abbott in the second most populous state in Australia.