Abortion may be legal in Australia, but accessing it is another matter. The last specialist clinic in Tasmania has shut down, leaving women in Tasmania with curtailed choices.
There is now only one place in the state which will perform second trimester abortions – for $2,500, and with only part time availability. This appalling state of affairs is the responsibility of health minister Michael Ferguson – a man who described the safe, cheap abortion pill RU486 as “a drug which will allow the death penalty to be imposed on unborn babies”.
The Tasmanian Health Department has allowed women who now have to travel interstate for an abortion to access funding to offset the cost of travel. This is a second-rate option.
It is not only more logistically difficult and stressful; the scheme also has strict regulations about who can access it and for what. Patients still have to contribute to the flights and accommodation, and the Health Department requires the patient to attend the nearest centre that provides the service. Only people under 18 are guaranteed support for someone to travel with them.
The clinic shut down because it wasn’t profitable enough to stay open. The Liberal state government has let three clinics shut despite the decriminalisation of abortion in Tasmania in 2013. Decriminalisation was a genuine victory, but legal wins are hollow without real access.
In the latest outburst of national security hysteria, ASIO spy chief Mike Burgess declared, in a speech on 28 February, that an unnamed former Australian politician had betrayed our beloved country by clandestinely working for an evil foreign spy network—which he called “the A-team”—to provide secret information to a rival power.
Measured by the sheer volume of stuff produced, capitalism is a very successful system. According to World Bank data, in 1960 global gross domestic product (GDP)—which measures the monetary value of goods and services sold—was just under US$1.4 trillion. By 2022 it had risen to $101 trillion. The world’s population has increased a lot in that time, but the volume of stuff produced has increased by far more.
As Israel’s latest brutal war against the people of Gaza drags on, the need to challenge the Zionist state and all those who facilitate its genocidal campaign couldn’t be clearer.
Banyule City Council has become the eighth metro council in the Melbourne area to formally call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
In a monumental betrayal, Melbourne University’s Students’ Council last month voted to rescind a motion supporting the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and the global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.
The military ordered hundreds of thousands of people into a designated “safe” zone. On reaching it, they were shelled by the army and the air force. The generals said there was another safe zone; if the people kept moving, respite would be found. It wasn’t. Again they were attacked. The scene repeated, but now, corralled onto a tiny stretch of beach and trapped against the ocean, there was no way out.