As well as forcing people to wait until the age of 70 before reaching the retirement age, the federal Coalition government also intends to push these septuagenarians into poverty.
The retirement pension for a single person is currently set at 27.7% of Male Total Average Weekly Earnings (MTAWE) and is indexed every six months. The National Commission of Audit set up by Treasurer Joe Hockey in October last year has conveniently provided the government with a recommendation to reduce this rate.
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鈥淭hings are looking positive and the wind is with us,鈥 Major General Craig Orme, commander of Australian forces in the latest war in the Middle East, told AAP on October 11.
If the US-led military coalition has a strategy against its latest enemy, the terrorist gang that calls itself the 鈥淚slamic State鈥 (IS), Orme was not revealing it.
鈥淚f they want to stay in one spot, we are very happy for them to do that,鈥 he said. 鈥淲e will just bomb them. When they do mass we will smack them and smack them hard.鈥
Progressive activists are contesting this year鈥檚 student campus council elections at the University of Western Sydney鈥檚 Bankstown campus.
RES Out West 鈥 Resisting Education Slashes 鈥 will run two activists for positions on the council and campus paper editors for 2015. Both are first year students and members of Resistance 鈥 Young Socialist Alliance.
Ian Escandor, also known as Esky, is a progressive hip-hop artist, community worker and student activist. He is studying Community Welfare and is active in the campaign to fight the education cuts on UWS Bankstown campus.
Toms River: A Story of Science & Salvation
Dan Fagin
Bantam Books, 2013
538 pages, $43.95 (hb)
In yet another chapter of the well-thumbed book of 鈥渃orporate avarice and government neglect鈥, writes Dan Fagin, the town of Toms River in New Jersey, two hours south of New York, paid a high price in cancer for the pollution of the chemical giant, Ciba-Geigy.
A community protest has condemned the assault of a 26-year-old woman on the Upfield train in Melbourne on September 25.
The woman was attacked by a female passenger as the train pulled into Batman Station in North Coburg, and then thrown from the carriage while the train was still moving. The assault was accompanied by racist and Islamophobic abuse directed at victim.
Community activists gathered at the station on October 1 to condemn the racist attack.
Fossil Free Sydney University released this statement on September 25.
***
In a historic referendum at the University of Sydney, voters overwhelmingly supported fossil fuel divestment. Eighty percent of the students demanded the Vice-Chancellor commit to divesting from fossil fuels.
In a first step last August the University froze further investment in all fossil fuels, pending review and consultation with stakeholders. Since then, all major student representative organisations have called upon the University to divest in full.
Last week the federal government released its first evaluation of how its controversial income management policy has fared in five locations where the scheme was introduced in July 2012.
This discriminatory government policy, which allows for Centrelink clients to have their payments quarantined and restricts how they can spend their money, has also been been explored in two recent government reports that have proposed extending the scheme.
The Who Pays for our Common Wealth report into tax contributions by the S&P ASX 200, Australia鈥檚 200 top stockmarket listed companies, has found that 84% of them paid less than the company tax rate of 30% in the period between 2004 and 2013. This amounts to $80 billion in forgone taxation revenue.
Tony Abbott鈥檚 government has backed away from the ludicrous proposal to force unemployed people to apply for 40 jobs a month to receive the paltry Newstart allowance.
The proposal would have generated 30 million job applications a month for the 147,000 jobs available to the 746,000 unemployed. But it was not an attack of common sense that led to the decision 鈥 it came after 7000 protesting 鈥渃over letters鈥 were sent to Employment Minister Eric Abetz, together with complaints from small businesses that they would be inundated with applications for non-existing jobs.
By the mid-1880s, all of the Australian colonies had passed education Acts based on the principal of 鈥渇ree, compulsory and secular鈥 education. This mirrored similar legislation in Britain where the Factory Act of 1833 had made it unlawful for children under nine years of age to be employed in textile factories.
In 1878, the Factory and Workshops Act extended this to all factories and limited the working hours of children under 14 years of age.
Latest polls suggests Bolivian President Evo Morales will be reelected for a third term in a landslide victory on October 12.
One week before the vote, Morales' support hit 57.3%. The latest statistics from pollster Tal Cual Comunicacion Estrategica indicate a huge win for the left-wing Morales, first elected in 2005 on the back of huge protests against neoliberialism.
Kobane鈥檚 epic resistance against the assault of the genocidal Islamic State (IS) gangs had entered its fourth week by October 10.
The defence had held out against overwhelming odds. The defenders had been forced back, but their lines had not been broken. In some neighbourhoods, street fighting was taking place.
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