Siobhan Kelly, president of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union, gave this speech at the 12th Socialist Alliance national conference, held over January 20-22 at the Geelong Trades Hall.
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鈥淩ichard Di Natale, I am a member of Left Renewal and I hope you can hear this because the Greens are my party too,鈥 a woman said to great applause at a meeting of (LR) on January 25.
More than 100 people, including from Newcastle and Wollongong, came to the first public meeting of LR, an anti-capitalist grouping within The Greens, to hear about its aims and objectives.
Melbourne's trams to be solar powered
The Victorian government announced on January 19 that Melbourne's tram network will soon be powered by the first large-scale solar plant to be built in Victoria.
The solar plant, which will be completed by the end of 2018, is expected to be located in Victoria's north-west.
The project is expected to create 300 new jobs and will produce 75 megawatts of power, with about half of that production to be linked to the tram network.
Cuts to the age pension, legislated in 2015, have begun. The main change is to the assets test taper rate.
For every additional $1000 in assets, pensioners now lose $78 a year (raised from $39). Previously, a homeowner couple with $1,178,000 in assets would have qualified for a part pension. This upper limit has dropped to $816,000. (These figures do not include the family home.)
Most of the arms companies that made to the Inquiry into Government Support for Australian Defence Industry Exports said government assistance in the promotion and facilitation of overseas arms sales should be increased.
The Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA) and The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Postgraduate Association (NATSIPA) support renaming January 26 as 鈥淚nvasion Day鈥. The two organisations decided this on January 15.
They are encouraging a rethink of the meaning of "Australia day" on January 26 to support justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. They are also urging people to attend one of the many nationwide protests on January 26 (see below).
January 25 marks 12 years since I left my beloved country, Iraq. The day I left I didn't know that over a decade later I would still be abroad, forever a foreigner.
I had a dream that things would get better, that I could go back and live there. That I could walk around freely in a stable country. None of us foresaw the horrors that awaited all, especially the ones who stayed.
Just two days after millions of people poured into the streets of Washington, D.C., and cities around the world for the historic Women鈥檚 March on Washington, President Trump has reinstated the controversial anti-abortion "global gag rule", which denies US funds to any international health care group involved in聽any activity in support of women鈥檚 rights to choose.聽
The Standing Rock Sioux tribe and supporters have said they will resist US President Donald Trump's to allow construction of the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) that threatens to destroy water supply of the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, as well as Native American sacred sites.
Dedicated to the legendary Polish-born socialist revolutionary and anti-war activist聽executed for her role in the 1919 German Revolution,聽the 22nd International 鈥淩osa Luxemburg Conference鈥 took place in Berlin on January 14.
The annual conference has become an annual gathering of revolutionaries, activists, academics, freedom fighters and politicians of the left.
Over 2,800 guests, were present at the event organised by the socialist daily newspaper Junge Welt (鈥淵oung World鈥), and more than 30 supporting organisations.
On January 19 six Canadian and two French activists travelling from Montreal, Quebec to Washington, DC to attend the Women鈥檚 March on Washington were stopped, questioned, and ultimately refused entry at a land border crossing near Champlain, New York.
鈥淲e said we were going to the Women鈥檚 March on Saturday and they said, 鈥榃ell, you鈥檙e going to have to pull over鈥,鈥 Sasha Dyck, told the Guardian.
For the next two hours, US border agents searched their cars, examined their cell phones, and fingerprinted each of the eight-person contingent.
In an overt case of political censorship, the unelected Inner West Council (IWC) sent contractors to remove Invasion Day graffiti on a wall in Camperdown Memorial Rest Park on January 24.
The graffiti 鈥 which read "Only fuckwits celebrate genocide" 鈥 was only painted alongside the First Nation flag the night before on a wall backing on to the Camperdown Cemetery.
Anyone who walks through this park knows that the walls, built in 1848, are full of graffiti, only some of which is political.
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