Australian Greens

Max Chandler-Mather reflects on his experiences in parliament so far as an “outsider”, the strengths and weaknesses of the housing campaign and the challenges involved in pushing for anti-establishment politics from within parliament.
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NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge addresses the Socialist Alliance national conference in January 2012. Photo: Peter Boyle
By Peter Boyle

February 4, 2012 -- Green Left Weekly -- Rupert Murdoch's flagship newspaper, The Australian, has been on a campaign to destroy the Australian Greens because the party represents a big electoral break from the two-parties-for-capitalism system that has dominated Australian politics for more than a century. In the past two weeks, this campaign has been hyped into McCarthyite Cold War hysteria.

By Pip Hinman and Peter Boyle

May 18, 2011 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Samah Sabawi, from Australians for Palestine, addressed a May 13, 2011, community forum in Holy Trinity Church Hall, Dulwich Hill, a suburb in Sydney, which was called by local residents to discuss the controversy (incited by Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd media empire) around a December 2010 decision by Marrickville Council to support the global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel's apartheid. Samah is introduced by Father Dave Smith, the local Anglican parish priest.


Samah Sabawi, part 2

Former Greens parliamentarian Sylvia Hale dissected the NSW Greens' stand in support of BDS and the struggle around the Marrickville Council position.

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By Tim Anderson

April 30, 2011 -- The proposal for a carbon tax raises the issues of tax equity and political strategy. Yet despite their inter-relatedness, we need to disentangle these issues to focus on the original question. As a mean of addressing climate change, the carbon tax proposal comes in the context of difficult global negotiations, where almost any proposal has been seen as a breakthrough, and where (after the last financial derivatives bubble) there is justified suspicion of emissions trading schemes.

In Australia the political context includes a narrow, two-party debate which has reverted to tax incidence, with both major parties basically captured by the major investor groups and Labor having recently been humiliated over a failed proposal for a new mining tax. Into this mix we have the Greens, presenting as an alternative, yet signing an accord with the Labor government over its carbon tax.

I would like to briefly touch on the tax equity issue, before moving to the carbon tax and then to the question of political strategies.

Tax equity