Australia and South Pacific
Australian jobless statistics reveal deep cuts to hours
By Chris Johnson, August 12, 2009
Australia’s unemployment figures for July revealed a dramatic cut to working hours and an ongoing shift from full-time to part-time work.
Australia: Media promotes sensationalised “terror” claims
By Mike Head, August 11, 2009
Despite scant police evidence, the Australian media has universally depicted five Muslim men arrested on August 4 in the course of extensive police raids as guilty of an extraordinary plot to attack a...
Grief turns to anger over Tongan ferry tragedy
By John Braddock, August 10, 2009
An estimated 95 people drowned, mainly women and children, when the Princess Ashika ferry sank in Tonga last week.
Australia: Rudd government urges employers and unions to cut hours and wages
By Terry Cook, August 8, 2009
With the assistance of the Rudd government and the unions, employers across Australia are utilising the economic crisis to impose sweeping changes to working conditions.
Australia: Labor’s “reform” to further privatise health care
By Mike Head, August 6, 2009
The Australian government’s National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission report has made clearer the pro-market and pro-business agenda of Labor’s health care “reform”.
Australian police carry out sweeping new “anti-terror” raids
By Mike Head, August 5, 2009
In the second largest police-intelligence raids ever conducted in Australia, around 400 officers searched 19 homes across Melbourne and a nearby country town at dawn yesterday, arresting four Lebanese...
Australian unions endorse Labor’s draconian industrial relations laws
By Terry Cook, August 4, 2009
Union delegates to Labor’s national conference last week lined up completely behind the Rudd government’s draconian “Fair Work” industrial relations regime.
Australia: Labor conference endorses war and “sacrifice”
By Mike Head, August 4, 2009
The Australian Labor Party concluded its three-day national conference with a tribute to former Prime Minister Bob Hawke and a unanimous endorsement of a “long-term” Australian military commitment...
Australia: Business lending dries up
By Alex Messenger, August 1, 2009
Despite media claims of imminent economic recovery, business lending plunged in Australia during the first half of 2009.
“The pain of recovery”: Rudd’s declaration of war on the working class
By Nick Beams, July 31, 2009
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s latest essay “Pain on the road to recovery”, published in the Sydney Morning Herald on July 25, could be more accurately titled “A declaration of war aga...
Australian Labor Party conference showcases “unity” and “discipline” for pro-business agenda
By Patrick O’Connor, July 31, 2009
Yesterday’s opening day of the Labor Party’s 45th national conference saw the assembled parliamentarians, apparatchiks, and trade union leaders issue a united and enthusiastic show of support for ...
Australia: Olympic gold medalist Ian Thorpe speaks out against Aboriginal “intervention”
By Richard Phillips, July 29, 2009
Powerful criticism of decades of deliberate government neglect of Australia’s poverty-stricken indigenous communities by former swimming star Ian Thorpe has been subjected to a virtual media black o...
