By Jay Fletcher - Green Left Weekly

Welfare quarantining — which restricts 50% of...payments to use at government-approved stores — was originally imposed on Aboriginal people living in 73 “prescribed areas”...The targets are those on unemployment benefits...and youth allowance, and parents with young children...Refugees with protection visas are also finding their income support restricted.

Sunday, March 6, 2011 - Green Left Weekly

David Hicks was one of the first “war on terror” detainees to be sent to the US military prison at Guantanamo the day it opened in January 2002...“Hicks was brutally tortured. Psychologically and physically for four years, maybe longer. He was injected in the back of his neck with unknown drugs. He was sodomized with a foreign object. He spent nearly a year in solitary confinement. He was beaten once for ten hours."

By Sam Wainwright - Sunday, February 20, 2011

...[T]he [Business Council of Australia] couldn't resist a chance to bang away on one of its favourite themes: welfare should be cut to encourage people to find work...What the BCA really means is that a pool of desperate and hungry unemployed people will help put downward pressure on wages and conditions across the whole labour market. This would free up more federal funds to be spent as handouts to big business.

By Toban Black

No human rights standards and no environmental standards are mentioned in [Toronto Stock Exchange] documents. The only stock listing requirements for companies are a matter of accountability to investors -- not communities, and not natural environments. But can we really expect much better from a multinational capitalist stock market? I don't think so.

By John Pilger - July 22, 2010

...[A]s Labor prime minister in the 1980s, [Bob] Hawke and his treasurer Paul Keating eliminated the most equitable spread of personal income on earth...And the [United States] loved Hawkie. Victor Marchetti, the CIA strategist who helped draft the treaty that gave America control over its most important spy base in the southern hemisphere [said] “When Hawke came along … he immediately sent signals that he knew how the game was played and who was buttering his bread. He became very co-operative, and even obsequious.”

By Will Watterson - June 20, 2010

As a New Zealander, I was both delighted and concerned to discover that my country is considered the most peaceful in the world...The New Zealand government sent troops to support the US-led invasion of Afghanistan immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks. They have been there ever since...[O]ur very own Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) have been heavily focused on supporting the US War on Terror since September 11, 2001. When the US switched it’s attention to Iraq, so did we.

By John Pilger - March 12, 2010

What is a murdochracy? It is where the fealty and augmentation of [media mogul Rupert] Murdoch's editors and managers are undisguised, an inspiration to his choir on seven continents...Dominant themes in the Australian murdochracy...are the promotion of war and jingoism, American foreign policy, Israel and a paternalism toward Aborigines, the world's most impoverished indigenous people...

By John Pilger - November 27, 2009

Today, almost everything has changed and has not changed. For many Aboriginal people...Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology last year was important...The resistance was formidable; white supremacist politicians, journalists and academics damned the "black armband version of our history"...Since Rudd's apology, Aboriginal poverty indicators have gone backwards...An undeclared agenda is straight from Australia's colonial past: a land grab combined with an almost prurient need to control, harass and blame a people who have refused to die off...

By John Pilger - November 07, 2009

I began to recognize and understand the Australian silence...I would like to talk about this silence: about how it affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war - against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else's country.

By Mike Blanchfield - August 22, 2009

Calling asylum seekers a "vulnerable group," Canada's privacy commissioner expressed concern yesterday about a new government plan to share fingerprint information with Britain and Australia to combat immigration fraud...A lawyers' group in Australia also raised privacy concerns about the plan, which the United States and New Zealand are expected to join later.

By Mike Head - 6 August 2009

In the guise of revamping...Medicare...the Labor government is actually preparing a major assault on public health care. [Labor Prime Minister Kevin] Rudd is setting out to exploit the already severe under-funding and running-down of public hospital and health services over the past three decades to increasingly transform the entire system into a market-driven one.

By Mike Head - 11 August 2009

Despite scant police evidence, the Australian media has universally depicted five Muslim men arrested on August 4...as guilty of an extraordinary plot to attack an army base. For days on end, the public has been fed hysterical headlines...assisting the security agencies and the Labor government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to whip up fresh fears of terrorism.

We are experiencing the methodical erosion of the Rule of Law in Australia, led by corrupt judges, members of parliament and lawyers.

Successful implementation of the White Australia policy by Australian PMs, MPs and the High Court of Australia. Dog whistling to the racists produces results.

By Andre Vltchek - June 18, 2009

...[T]he great majority of the people in the English speaking so-called "First World" actually believe what they read in the newspapers and what they see on the television screens. The lies and one-sidedness seem to be too obvious to be ignored! But they mostly are...It is the responsibility of those who know the world and understand the suffering of its people to speak the truth. No matter what the cost, no matter how many privileges will disappear with each honest sentence...Not to speak truth to power...but against power. To disregard existing institutions from media to academia, as they are no solution but part of the problem, co-responsible for the state of the world in which we are living!