�鶹��ý

The following open letter has been sent to every Greens MP in the country on August 10. *** The Greens have since their foundation been a party that supports justice and the rule of law. It is a party committed, at its very core, to universal human rights and international law. The official policy for Israel/Palestine is to:

The ALP has narrowly held on to the Victorian seat of Melbourne despite a swing to the Greens in the July 21 by-election. Greens candidate Cathy Oke won the highest primary vote, getting 36.5% to ALP candidate Jennifer Kanis’ 33.4%. But distribution of preferences gave the ALP 52% and the Greens 48%. The Greens’ vote increased by 4.6%. The Liberals did not run in the election, although a Liberal Party member running as an independent won 4.7% of the primary vote.

The obvious question posed by Labor's recent attacks on the Greens for being dangerous extremists is: who the hell keeps asking Paul Howes for his opinion?

Socialist Alliance National co-convener Peter Boyle spoke alongside NSW Greens MLC John Kaye at the opening session of �鶹��ý Weekly’s Climate Change Social Change conference in Parramatta on June 30. His speech is below. * * * I want to dedicate this little presentation to our Pakistani comrade Baba Jan — who has been imprisoned and tortured since August last year for standing up for the rights of his people from the Hunza Valley after their villages and farmlands were flooded in 2010.

So it has been reported that Clive “Stop Taxing Me” Palmer's main private company, Mineralogy, hasn't paid tax for three years. He really is pulling out all stops to be the best cardboard cutout evil capitalist he can. You have to wonder what he'll do next. My guess is call a press conference to announce he's established a paramilitary organisation of Nazi kittens dedicated to wiping out what's left of Australia's native fauna.

There is a lot to celebrate in the legacy of retiring Greens leader Senator Bob Brown. Above all, he has been central to holding together the most successful new electoral party project in Australia that sits significantly to the left of the traditional parties of government, Labor and Liberal-National. The Greens won 1.7 million votes out of 13 million voters in the last federal election.

The Greens were dead against the former Rudd Labor government’s Carbon Pollution Trading Scheme (CPRS) in 2009 and voted it down in parliament. Today, the Greens are champions of the Gillard Labor government’s carbon price. A says it only “happened because of the Greens”. The strangest thing is that the two carbon price schemes — Rudd’s and Gillard’s — are mostly the same.

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

Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore made clear at a Sydney City Council meeting on November 6 that she supported the “principles” of the Occupy movement but did not support Occupy Sydney. Greens councillor Irene Doutney put a motion to investigate the dawn police raid on the group in Martin Place and help find Occupy a site for the protest. But Moore replied that she had to “balance the rights of residents, visitors, workers and others to have access to the public domain”.

At its State Delegates Council meeting held on December 4 in Sydney, the NSW Greens unanimously endorsed the following proposal: That the Greens NSW call upon all Australians and the Australian government to boycott Israeli goods, trading and military arrangements, and sporting, cultural and academic events as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel's occupation and colonisation of Palestinian territory, the siege of Gaza and imprisonment of 1.5 million people, and Israel's institution of a system of apartheid, by endorsing the following actions:

In response to an unprovoked and grotesque attack on the NSW Greens’ offices, discovered as staff arrived to work on November 8, the Socialist Alliance released the following statement. * * * The NSW Socialist Alliance condemns the cowardly attack, involving faeces, on the offices of the NSW Greens sometime over the night of November 7-8. Such actions have no place within a democratic society and should be rejected by all supporters of democracy.

The NSW government has decided to cut the solar photovoltaic feed-in tariff from 60 cents per kilowatt hour (kW/h) to 20 cents per kW/h. The October 27 announcement came after the tariff received a strong uptake, particularly in Sydney’s western suburbs and rural NSW. The total capacity once remaining orders are connected will be around 193 megawatts (MW). The Greens and the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) slammed the decision to axe the tariff.