�鶹��ý

The advertising industry is insidious. A massive US$464 billion was estimated to have been spent in 2011. Next year it is tipped to grow by another US$22 billion despite the ongoing economic crisis in Europe and the US.

Photos by Peter Boyle More than 500 women and their supporters marched through Sydney's CBD on March 10 for an International Women's Day protest.

“Capitalism wrecks everything,” Liam Flenady, Socialist Alliance candidate for South Brisbane in the March 24 Queensland election, told a meet-the-cadidates forum sponsored by �鶹��ý Weekly on March 6. "The neoliberal agenda of the past three decades means privatising profits, and socialising losses. Queensland and Australia are in the midst of a political crisis right now. "People have generally lost confidence in the major parties and their support for the status quo. But they don't yet have a firm belief in a viable alternative project.

The Ballerrt Mooroop College Support Group met on March 4 to discuss action in response to the imminent closure of the college, which is the last surviving Aboriginal school in Melbourne. Aboriginal people in the area have worked hard to keep the school open. But over the past 12 months, the education department has taken much of the land away and bulldozed the valuable student and community asset, the gymnasium/gathering place.

In 1963, a senior Australian government official, A R Taysom, deliberated on the wisdom of deploying women as trade representatives. “Such an appointee would not stay young and attractive for ever [because a] spinster lady can, and very often does, turn into something of a battleaxe with the passing years [whereas] a man usually mellows.” On International Women’s Day 2012, such primitive views are worth recalling; but what has happened to modern feminism? Why is it so bereft of its political, indeed socialist roots, that any woman who “achieves” within an immoral system is to be admired?