What’s the alternative to the NTEU framework – and if it’s really so bad, why are the leadership pushing it ?

Next week, NTEU members will be called on to vote on the controversial National Jobs Protection Framework, the plan developed by the union’s national leadership, without any consultation of members, to address the crisis in university funding triggered by Covid-19. Since information about the framework emerged, NTEU branches at Sydney, Latrobe, Monash, RMIT, Melbourne, Victoria,…

Follow The Leaders? The Role Of Universities In A Collapsing Climate

New Matilda, 18 February 2020. Original here. In a few days, amid the most serious environmental crisis since European invasion, students in Australia will begin the new university year. Only a small number of them will have been evacuated from holiday beaches during the worst of the summer bushfire inferno; even fewer will have lost…

Bushfires: we need a more oppositional political culture

New Matilda, 7 January 2020, under the title 'Two Sides, Same Coin: It’s Not About Labor Or Liberal Anymore. It’s Too Late For That Now'. Original here. Amidst the bushfire devastation, it’s natural to hope that one saving grace pulled from the ashes might be greater public resolve to convert the desire for climate action…

France’s Left Is Finally Fighting Islamophobia

Jacobin, 14 November 2019. Read the original here. For decades, Islamophobia has been central to the exercise of political power in France. Now, after years of paralysis, the Left is finally starting to fight it. On October 28, two elderly Muslim men were badly wounded when a gunman attacked a mosque in Bayonne in southwest…

Tomorrow Students Strike For Their Future. But Like Iraq in 2003, They Shouldn’t Assume They’ll Be Heard

New Matilda, 4 March 2019. Original here. Among people who care about the planet, the massive turnouts expected around the country – and the world – for tomorrow’s climate demonstrations are fueling justified excitement. It’s not just that hundreds of thousands of students will go on strike from school and demand real action on global…

The Attack on Palestinian Universities

Jacobin, 30 December 2018. Read the original here. Israel’s efforts to cripple higher education in occupied Palestine continued relentlessly in 2018, with Israeli universities acting as key tools of the occupation. The systematic punishment inflicted on Palestinian academics and students didn’t attract anything like the global attention of Gazans’ March of Return, but it deserves…

Lessons from the Yellow Vests? Some thoughts on unions, ‘recruitment’ and ‘mobilisation’

If the French Yellow Vests have had such impact in the absence of any of the usual structures of organised unionism, what are the implications for how those structures might need to be rethought?

Boycotting Eurovision: Why Aren’t Progressives Doing More For Palestine?

New Matilda, 23 October 2018. Original here. Last week’s announcement that the government is open to moving Australia’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem caused consternation among progressives and, indeed, most reasonable people. As if Morrison’s irresponsible bid for the Zionist vote in Wentworth wasn’t enough, Australia last week also joined Israel and the US in…

Manus Crisis: Our Protests Must Build Momentum

New Matilda, 4 November 2017. Read the original here. As the crisis on Manus Island deepens, it’s easy to forget the reason the detention centre is closing in the first place: the PNG Supreme court found that imprisoning Australia’s refugees breached their fundamental rights, and was therefore unconstitutional. How are those same human rights being…

Nuit Debout. A new bottom-up movement on the streets of France

Arena Magazine 142 2016, 130-134. Read the original here. Since Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park, the occupation of public space has imposed itself as the Left’s globally favoured mode of confrontation with the standing political order. The most recent example—the ‘Nuit Debout’ (‘Up All Night’) movement in France—captured public attention at the end of March…