Issue 81: Alligator : 10 March to 16 March
# Climate control
How climate change is impacting health in Australia
Annabelle Warren | The Saturday Paper
From the Black Summer bushfires to the extreme flooding in Queensland and New South Wales, the hidden aspect of climate change is its enormous impact on health.
Is battling back-to-back disasters distracting us from fighting the climate crisis?
Jeff Sparrow | The Guardian
As floods follow fires, we need to hold our leaders’ feet to the flames – or, for that matter, to the water.
Make the fossil fuel companies pay
Alex Kelly | OverlandWhen it comes to climate-induced disasters the Coalition wants to save for a rainy day – but it’s already pouring
Richard Denniss | The Guardian
Australia is one of the richest countries in the world, but while there’s no shortage of money to fund the $16bn-a-year stage three tax cuts for our highest-income earners, when it comes to helping families and businesses recover from the complete devastation of record floods and fires, apparently we need to hasten slowly.
# Resistance and Research
Australian mental health workers to take stopwork action Margaret Rees | World Socialist Web Site
The HACSU called the three-hour stopwork to try to head off the growing anger of poorly-paid mental health workers toward the Victorian Labor government.
More evidence of ‘genocidal killings’ of Aboriginal people in frontier times, University of Newcastle research reveals
Bridget Brennan, Kirstie Wallauer | ABC News
How Indigenous communities are protecting their mob in NSW Floods
Jarred Cross | National Indigenous Times
Prisoners scale Hakea Prison roof to ‘protest Yuendumu verdict’
Giovanni Torre | National Indigenous Times
Sudan: Resistance Committees are the ‘spearhead’ of the revolution
T Hassan, W Madit | Green Left
# Reformation
‘Invisible’ tax breaks for the well-off work like magic
Ross Gittins | SMHTheAge
Actual government spending is examined carefully each year by the bureaucrats and by the Expenditure Review Committee of Cabinet, whereas all the spending on tax concessions tends to be ignored.
Rise in hours worked signals post-lockdown recovery, but more people have multiple jobs than ever
Greg Jericho | The Guardian
There was not just a return to more work being done by people in their existing jobs, but there was also an increase in the number of people working a second job.
‘Enormous strain’: hospital in flooded regions suffer as COVID cases surge
Amber Schultz | Crikey
Don’t expect much – with climate disasters you will largely be on your own
Lucy Hamilton | Pearls and Irritations
When Scott Morrison chides inundated Australians about expecting too much from the government or the ADF during a crisis, he is not just speaking about the nightmare scale of these catastrophic floods. He is setting expectations for the climate emergency’s cascading disasters.
Climate change, not war, is the greatest security threat
Jacob Andrewartha | Green Left
Oligarchs with ties to resources sector left off government sanctions list
Kishor Napier-Raman | Crikey
Two powerful Russian oligarchs with ties to Australia’s fossil fuel sector are yet to face sanctions, despite being targeted in the United States and United Kingdom.
As emotions run high, Western media shuts down dissent and debate on the how and why of Ukraine war
Guy Rundle | Crikey
The reasons behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine are complex and messy, but the West sticks stubbornly to the NATO storyline.
Russian Maoist Party – Theses on the War
Russian Maoist Party | Vanguard
Under sanctions the oligarchs will wage war, presumably save on spending on the people, dismantle the infrastructure and develop the regime into a 1970s analogue of right-wing Latin American dictatorships with caveman anti-communism, torture, kidnapping and murder of dissenters
The cold war terrors are back, baby, and generation X finally has something to offer the young
Van Badham | The Guardian
As the millennial and zoomer generations wig out about atomic incident monitoring and a new reality of “escalation”, it seems ol’ generation X finally has cultural treasure to offer the young.
Looming Catastrophe: Nuclear Threats in the Ukraine-Russian War
Guy Rundle | Arena
Just as atomic and sub-atomic technologies reach into every corner of reality to transform it unceasingly, so too the US post-Second World War empire, powered by notions of a universal idea of right, bound up in individualism, capital and technophilia, seeks to transform and occupy any alternative source of power, locality and difference.