Unprecedented Times

By Cian Galea

Cramped Detention Centres With Inadequate Healthcare Facilities Are A COVID19 Disaster In Waiting

On 19 March 2020, the story of an immigration detention centre guard testing positive for coronavirus was drowned out by reports of 2700 passengers being allowed to disembark from the Ruby Princess in Sydney.  It is in keeping with the callous cruelty and incompetence of the Department of Immigration that their failure to ‘stop’ the one boat that posed any threat to Australia stifled a realisation of the threat that COVID-19 poses to asylum seekers in detention.

By Nick Daniel and Charlotte Brady

The COVID19 & Climate Change Crises Demand a Radical New Path for Labor

Coronavirus may be killing the economy but it has been on life support for a very long time.  Every indicator tells us we are about to enter the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The immediate cause will be the pandemic, but we should not ignore the fact that this is a new phase of a crisis with a far deeper heritage. The need to organise towards a fairer and greener future, towards a Green New Deal, has never been more urgent.

By Zac Gillies-Palmer

COVID19 Has Exposed The Rotten Core Of Our Economic System

Piece by piece, COVID19 is stripping the Australian economy back to those forms of work we can’t live without: healthcare, aged-care, and education. At the coalface of these industries are hundreds of thousands of underpaid and overburdened workers who are risking their lives to ensure that our society can continue to function during the lockdown. Under normal circumstances, we are encouraged to consider their contributions ‘ancillary’ to the headline indicators of economic prosperity. In the grips of this unprecedented crisis that narrative has become impossible to sustain.