Chris White challenges Kevin Rudd's industrial relations policy. The right to strike is fundamental to the right to freedom of association.

The Howard government has removed the right to strike almost to the point of suppression. It came as a surprise to hear Kevin Rudd picking out strikes as a problem in his speech to the National Press Club on April 17.

 
 
 
 
 

Three of the four International Socialist Tendency groups in Australia have merged. Marcus Strom was there

Given its history of hair-trigger splits over issues real or imagined, it is not every day that groups from the Trotskyist tradition merge. Yet over the first weekend of February this year three groups in Australia from the British Socialist Workers Party’s International Socialist Tendency agreed to form a single organisation.

 
 
 
 
 

Why the Stop Bush, Make Howard History protest was a success

Without wanting to endorse the specific approach of the DSP, we can't help but agree that there was a lot of ultra-left posturing in the lead up to the Stop Bush demonstration. Thank goodness that the sense of the demonstrators won through and it was a peaceful and disciplined march.

By Pip Hinman and Alex Bainbridge, DSP

 
 
 
 
 
Lunging, flailing, mispunching

Terry Eagleton lambasts Richard Dawkins's mechanical materialism.

REVIEW: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding.

 
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Editor of the National Indigenous Times, Chris Graham, says that indigenous Australians have had their definitive say on the government's martial law intervention in Northern Territory communities.

I never quite understood how former Aboriginal Affairs minister Mal Brough managed to escape genuine mainstream media scrutiny so often during his brief but, shall we say, "exciting" time in indigenous affairs. I always just put it down to the "conga line of suckholes" phenomenon identified by Mark Latham (albeit as a "Liberal" inclination in dealings with Americans ... but as we all know a trait which also besets some in the media when confronted with a "Minister").

 
 
 
 
 

The last-man-standing of Bush’s coalition of the willing was unceremoniously dumped in the November 2007 Australian election, writes Marcus Strom.

Former Labor leader and party apostate Mark Latham called it the Seinfeld election, an election about nothing. Incoming prime minister Kevin Rudd’s “me-too-ism” aside, there was enough difference between the Australian Labor Party and John Howard’s conservative coalition government for the Australian electorate and the working class in particular to comprehensively demolish the conservative’s hold on Australian politics.

 
 
 
 
 

Phil Doyle says that the Your Rights At Work campaign won't be airbrushed out of Labor’s victory.

"It’s time for a new page to be written in our nation’s history." Kevin Rudd, November 24, 2007.

In the lead up to the 2007 federal election tens of thousands of ordinary Australians mobilised into a concerted campaign to change a government. These people re-wrote Australian history.

Yet, as soon as that victory was achieved, their efforts were all but ignored by, not just vast swathes of the media, but also by the ultimate beneficiaries, the incoming government.

 
 
 
 
 

With presidential elections imminent Scott Hamilton looks at the role of Australian 'security forces' in East Timor.

East Timor’s Fretilin party has revealed that Australian troops stopped a convoy of its election campaigners at gunpoint and threatened to kill one of them last week. The convoy of Fretilin vehicles was on its way back from an election rally in the eastern town of Gleno on March 26 when an Australian army vehicle appeared. Australian troops brandished their guns at the Fretilin campaigners, and the driver of one car was pulled from his vehicle, trod on and had a gun placed to his head. When the driver attempted to protest, the Australian holding the gun shouted ’Fuck you. I’ll kill you’.

 
 
 
 
 

David Hicks's conviction is a ludicrous political stitch-up. We will never accept it, writes Mark Kelly.

David Hicks is the first person from Gitmo to be tried. There is no obvious procedure for trying people, nor for meting out the sentences handed down from any trial. Hicks is unique, however, in the fact that he is the subject of a significant campaign with majority support in his homeland to have him returned.

 
 
 
 
 

Kevin Rudd, ALP national conference and uranium mining. By Marcus Strom

Kevin Rudd is gearing up for his first ALP national conference as party leader. Labor loves a winner and the boy from the back blocks of rural Queensland seems to be the party's best hope to take the required 16 seats from the coalition at year's end.

 
 
 
 
 
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