“Sydney’s gay community is rightly hurt and angry. Police should not march in this year’s Mardi Gras.” So said the Sydney Morning Herald editorial on 25 February. By the end of the day, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras board had uninvited the police from marching in Saturday’s parade. By 28 February, they had invited them back, albeit wearing T-shirts with a police logo instead of their uniforms.
It was only in July 2008, four years after Nelson Mandela announced that he was retiring from public life and fourteen years after he had been elected president of South Africa, that US President George W. Bush signed a bill to remove Mandela’s organisation, the African National Congress, from the US terrorism watch list.
The 1967 referendum on Indigenous issues defied the propensity of referendums in Australia to fail. In fact, with 90.77 percent voting Yes, the referendum passed by a margin greatly surpassing all other successful ones.
Before the March 2023 NSW election, state ALP leader Chris Minns made a series of promises to public sector workers: to hire more nurses, to create more teaching positions and to improve public sector pay and working conditions, including scrapping the public sector wage cap of 2.5 percent for all 400,000 public sector workers.
The World Health Organization declared on 5 May that the public health emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic is over. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus proclaimed that the downward trend of the pandemic has “allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before COVID-19”.
It is a real treat to have a new edition of Socialist Alternative member Tom O’Lincoln’s 1993 book, Years of Rage: Social Conflicts in the Fraser Era. While the text remains basically unchanged, as it did in the 2012 re-issue, this edition by left-wing publisher Interventions is significantly expanded and enlivened by the addition of photos, leaflets and posters from the time, and a twelve-page afterword by Rick Kuhn.