As Julian Assange faces his extradition trial, James Supple takes a look at the role of information in the fight for social change

For months now Solidarity has been reporting on the growing contradictions between the hopes that people had for a progressive Rudd government and the reality of the new government’s performance.

The Sydney Morning Herald headline said it all about Professor Ross Garnaut’s latest round of reports: “Sigh of relief from business”.

A mass meeting of 6000 Victorian building workers, members of the CFMEU, in late August, voted to accept the latest EBA put to them by the union officials.

The Victorian government’s decision to legalise abortion rights is a slap in the face for the anti-abortion lobby. After the religious right’s attempts to undermine abortion rights, it is a reminder of the overwhelming majority support for the right to choose.

Labor looks to have lost its monopoly on power at a state level in the WA election.

A planned protest convergence against the NT intervention, set to begin in Mparntwe-Alice Springs in late September, is gathering widespread support.

A proposal to build a major new solar power station in the Pilbara region of Western Australia has been largely ignored by the mainstream press.

HOMELESS MELBOURNE students and their student union supporters took action last month to address a housing shortage and associated rent rises. They are occupying a disused university-owned building at 278 Faraday Street, in inner-city Carlton, which has been vacant for three years.

KEVIN RUDD’S announcement at the Pacific Islands forum that he would grant 2500 temporary work visas over three years to Pacific Islanders to pick fruit and vegetables has sparked debate within the Australian union movement and the left.

BATTLE LINES have been drawn in the Senate. The Rudd government is accusing the Liberals of holding their budget to ransom by blowing a funding hole in it.

Activists from around the country are celebrating the cancellation of the first arms fair planned in Australia in 17 years.

The resignation of Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf was greeted with jubilant demonstrations across Pakistan. But it will not remove the tensions within Pakistani politics.

Some of the China-bashing that accompanied the Beijing Olympics was nothing short of nauseating.

After a week dominated by Barack Obama’s consecration at the Democratic convention in Denver, his Republican rival has succeeded brilliantly in upstaging him by selecting Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate.

One year, 810 federal public servants, $900 million on—Jean Parker’s intervention report-card

Paddy Gibson puts the recent flashes of violence between Russia and Georgia in context

With the government threatening to close so-called “unviable communities” as part of the intervention in the NT, Mark Gillespie looks at the shameful history of Mapoon—an Aboriginal community declared unviable and burned to the ground forty-five years ago

There is a desperate need to invest in public services infrastructure in NSW. Lack of spending has led to ongoing scandals in the hospital system and the deterioration of public transport.

Why would a Labor government push ahead with a power privatisation plan opposed by 85 per cent of voters, rejected by a massive majority at its own party conference, and needing (but not getting) the votes of the Liberal/National Coalition to get it through parliament?

Review: On Rage
By Germaine Greer, Melbourne University Press, $19.95

Directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, Now showing

By Christine Jackman, Melbourne University Press, $34.95

Directed by Chris Nolan

Veteran Trotskyist Issy Wyner passed away in August, aged 92.

Kevin Rudd has sent big business the message that the government wants to leave most of WorkChoices intact. Now a push is on by some of the country’s biggest companies to get around even Labor’s paltry changes and continue using WorkChoices-style arrangements in an effort to hold down wages.

THE TOPPLING of NSW Premier Morris Iemma and Treasurer Michael Costa, and the defeat of their plans to privatise the power stations, is a real victory against Labor’s agenda of privatisation and economic rationalism. It is also a blow against Kevin Rudd who made it clear that power privatisation fitted with federal Labor’s economic agenda.

Rudd’s new schools plan has been widely condemned. Not only does it revive the former Liberal government’s attempt to implement a “league table” ranking schools, it mimics Howard’s scapegoating of teacher unions for the problems created by government underfunding.

Solidarity interviewed one of the key thinkers from the global justice movement, Walden Bello, of Focus on the Global South, during his visit to Sydney to talk about the decline of US power